CONTENTS
1. Stanford “stooping to new lows”
2. British Muslims force Holocaust Memorial Day cancellation
3. Spanish town attempts to hold “Palestinian Genocide Day”
4. Thank you, BBC
5. David Irving: Auschwitz was “a tourist attraction”
6. Holocaust memorial in Berlin used as a public lavatory by tourists
7. 5,000 Euro Holocaust fine for French politician
8. Anti-Semitic attacks up in Argentina
9. Russia sentences anti-Semitic editor
10. “Holocaust denial comes to Stanford” (Stanford Daily, Jan. 25, 2007)
11. “Bolton bans Holocaust Day” (Jewish Telegraph, Jan. 26, 2007)
12. “Marked rise in attacks on Jews in Europe over the past year” (Ha’aretz, Jan. 29, 2007)
13. “Murdered Frenchman Halimi to be buried in Jerusalem next month” (EJP, Jan. 21, 2007)
14. “Irving denies gas chambers existed at Auschwitz” (AP, Jan. 25, 2007)
15. “Holocaust memorials defiled by neo-Nazis” (Times of London, Jan. 30, 2007)
This dispatch deals with contemporary anti-Semitism. This phenomena forms an important backdrop to attitudes on Israel in the Muslim and wider world, which is why I occasionally include articles on this subject.
STANFORD “STOOPING TO NEW LOWS”
In the first piece below, Stanford law school fellow Amichai Magen writes of “a relentless campaign to demonize the Jewish People and delegitimize Israel” on the campus of Stanford, one of the world’s leading universities.
“The Coalition for Justice in the Middle East (CJME) and its splinter group, ‘Students Confronting Apartheid in Israel (SCAI)’… are stooping to new lows and aligning themselves with the most radical elements in the Middle East by hosting Norman Finkelstein on this campus.”
Finkelstein, who is of Jewish origin, voices opinions which are regarded by many as anti-Semitic. He does not, says Magen, claim (like David Irving) that the Holocaust did not happen but that “the Jews, in a fiendish conspiracy, have fabricated a ‘Holocaust Industry’ in order to portray themselves as victims, cynically exploit their suffering and consolidate Israel as a power set on regional domination. If the Holocaust had never happened, the Jews would have invented it themselves, since the Holocaust served their diabolical quest for money and global imperialism.”
Finkelstein also has a track record of exaggerating the numbers of Roma and homosexuals killed by the Nazis in order to downplay Jewish suffering.
* For more on Finkelstein, see the last note in the dispatch, Jews against Israel: King, Kaufman, & Judt, Europe’s so-called “good Jews” (Dec. 1, 2005).
* For Roma and the Holocaust, see this article by myself in The Wall Street Journal.
BRITISH MUSLIMS FORCE HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY CANCELLATION
The council for the northern British town of Bolton scrapped its Holocaust Memorial Day event last Saturday.
It is to replaced with a Genocide Memorial Day in June. This is in line with the policy of the Muslim Council of Britain who continue to boycott Holocaust Memorial Day in favor of a Genocide Day which also includes “the ongoing genocide and human rights abuses of Palestinians” by Israelis. There is, of course, no genocide of the Palestinians, and those that suggest there is, usually do so out of anti-Semitic motives.
The Bolton council decision was made in consultation with the town’s Interfaith Council. But Rabbi Joseph Lever of United Synagogue who has participated in the Bolton event for the last three years was not consulted on the decision.
In September 2005, British prime minister Tony Blair was urged to ditch Holocaust Day in favor of Genocide Day. For more see Blair urged to ditch Holocaust Day; UK government advisor says Holocaust “a myth” (Sept. 12, 2005).
SPANISH TOWN ATTEMPTS TO HOLD “PALESTINIAN GENOCIDE DAY”
Also last weekend, the Spanish town of Ciempozuelos near Madrid decided to cancel the UN-established International Holocaust Remembrance Day in lieu of “The Day Commemorating the Genocide of the Palestinian People”. Last minute action by the Israeli Embassy in Madrid and by Spanish officials resulted in the town canceling both. The Anti-Defamation League slammed the decision to cancel the Holocaust memorial day as “shameful.”
The affair was covered extensively by the Spanish press. El Mundo, the country’s largest daily newspaper, ran an editorial on the Ciempozeulos affair under the title – “An insult to Israel”.
THANK YOU, BBC
The “Global Forum Against Anti-Semitism” has said that “2006 was characterized by escalation in the number and violent nature of attacks on Jews, proliferation of Holocaust denial and increased comparison of Israel to the Nazi regime.”
Last year saw a substantial rise in the number of anti-Semitic incidents in particular in Germany, Austria and Scandinavia. Jewish Agency official Amos Hermon linked the rise in anti-Semitic incidents to “the recent Lebanon war and the Qana incident [which] led to the most severe incidents in the past decade.” (Qana was badly misreported, in a way which, unsurprisingly, stirred up hatred of Jews in general. See my article “The Media Works for Hizbullah”.)
One of the worst anti-Semitic incidents in the past year was the murder of Ilan Halimi. The penultimate article below reports that his body will be buried in Jerusalem on February 9. For more on Ilan Halimi, see my article “The barbarians of Europe”.
DAVID IRVING: AUSCHWITZ WAS “A TOURIST ATTRACTION”
David Irving, a British “historian,” who was jailed by Austria for three years in February 2006 for repeatedly questioning the Holocaust, but was released last month on appeal, has again claimed that the Auschwitz death camp was a tourist attraction, and added that there was no proof that there were ever gas chambers there.
Irving made his repulsive comments during an interview with Italy’s Sky TG24 News. He said “At Auschwitz they did not have gas chambers, or at least there is no proof that I am satisfied with.”
For more on Irving, see: David Irving says from prison: “The Jews will see a second Holocaust in 20 to 30 years” (Feb. 27, 2006).
HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL IN BERLIN USED AS A PUBLIC LAVATORY BY TOURISTS
The final article below, a report in yesterday’s Times of London, reveals that the main Holocaust memorial in Berlin is being used as a public lavatory by tourists and by neo-Nazi sympathizers. The defacing of Jewish memorial areas in Germany by followers of the far Right has become a widespread problem, says The Times. On the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day last weekend, a group of youths set fire to a restored Holocaust era railway carriage in Lower Saxony. Among other similar incidents, in Frankfurt an der Oder, on the Polish border, three youths urinated on a Jewish memorial.
5,000 EURO HOLOCAUST FINE FOR FRENCH POLITICIAN
Bruno Gollnisch, the No. 2 in the far-right National Front party in France, last week received a three-month suspended jail sentence and was fined 5,000 Euros ($6,500) for questioning the Holocaust.
ANTI-SEMITIC ATTACKS UP IN ARGENTINA
Anti-Semitic attacks increased sharply during the past year in Argentina, according to a new study released by the DAIA Jewish political umbrella group. They said there were 540 reported cases of serious anti-Semitic attacks in 2006. That’s 32 percent higher than in 2005, when 376 attacks were reported.
RUSSIA SENTENCES ANTI-SEMITIC EDITOR
The editor of a fringe anti-Semitic newspaper in northwestern Russia was sentenced last week to more than two years in prison for inciting ethnic hatred. Russian news agencies reported that a court in Novgorod ruled that Pavel Ivanov, editor of Russkoe Veche, was also guilty of inciting extremist activity through his newspaper. It was unclear whether Ivanov, 57, who has beaten similar charges several times in the past, will appeal the sentence.
I attach six articles below.
-- Tom Gross
FULL ARTICLES
“SHOULD THIS ACADEMIC FRAUDSTER BE ENTERTAINED AT STANFORD UNIVERSITY?”
Holocaust denial comes to Stanford
By Amichai Magen
The Stanford Daily
January 25, 2007
The Coalition for Justice in the Middle East (CJME) and its splinter group, Students Confronting Apartheid in Israel (SCAI), are at it again; pulling no punches in their relentless campaign to demonize the Jewish People and delegitimize Israel. Tonight, the two student groups are stooping to new lows and aligning themselves with the most radical elements in the Middle East by hosting Norman Finkelstein on this campus.
Finkelstein is an academic joke, and a bad one at that. The 54-year-old Assistant Professor at DePaul University, Illinois, has been hired and let go by several middling schools, before gaining his current (untenured) position in 2003. The New York Times Book Review has described his work as “juvenile,” “arrogant” and “stupid.”
He is an American-born son of two Holocaust survivors who began his career as an anti-Israel political agitator – circumstances which on their own make his claims to objective historical scholarship on the Holocaust highly suspect. Finkelstein can neither read nor write German. Being unable to access many of the sources that are the foundation of sound research in this highly complex and sensitive field has not prevented Finkelstein from passing sweeping, tendentious and twisted judgments on one of the saddest, and most important, episodes in human history.
In essence, Finkelstein’s argument is as follows: The Jews, in a fiendish conspiracy, have fabricated a “Holocaust Industry” in order to portray themselves as victims, cynically exploit their suffering and consolidate Israel as a power set on regional domination. If the Holocaust had never happened, the Jews would have invented it themselves, since the Holocaust served their diabolical quest for money and global imperialism.
This thesis is a hodge-podge of pathological paranoia, ignorance, malice and brutal disrespect to the memory of the millions of human beings systematically murdered by the Nazis (Christians, Jews and Muslims). If we applied Finkelstein’s warped logic, we would conclude that Blacks “exploit” the history of slavery to obtain civil rights gains or that in the 20th-century, women have created a “Feminism Industry” in a cruel attempt to gain power and subjugate men. How many Einsteins, how many Kafkas, how many Menuhins, how many lives (born and yet to be born) were lost forever in the furnaces of Auschwitz? The world will never know. But to suggest that the Jewish People, or anyone else on this planet, has “profited” from the extinguishing of so many souls – each of infinite value in its own right – is monstrous beyond belief.
Finkelstein’s brand of Holocaust denial is all the more pernicious for its relative subtlety. Unlike David Irving – who claims the gas chambers never existed and that Hitler was the Jews’ greatest friend – Finkelstein (who calls Irving “a good historian”) admits that it did happen, and then proceeds to turn the Holocaust into a tool with which to attack its primary victim. In the Finkelstenian mind, the Jews, and the Jews alone, are prohibited from collective mourning. Jewish insistence that the Holocaust be remembered becomes an act of unforgivable Jewish aggression, for which Israel must be “censured,” to use one of his favorite expressions of attack. This Holocaust erosion is at once more subversive and more dangerous than the outright factual denial practiced by the likes of Irving or Iran’s President, Ahmedinejad. It insidiously assaults our moral imperative to remember the Holocaust and eats away at its chief lesson to humanity: Never again!
Not surprisingly, Finkelstein has become the house favorite of neo-fascists in America, Europe and the Middle East; the dream-Jew of the post-Holocaust anti-Semites. David Duke – the white supremacist and former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klax Klan – endorses him warmly on his Web site (www.davidduke.com). German neo-Nazi queen, Ingrid Rimland, has intimated that Finkelstein’s writing makes her feel “like a kid in a candy store.” And Finkelstein’s own enthusiasm for Osama bin Laden and Hezbollah have made him a welcome guest on the radical Shiite militia’s official satellite TV station, Al-Manar.
Finkelstein is an American citizen and thus at liberty to express his odious views. But free speech is not at issue here. The real question is should this academic fraudster be entertained at Stanford University? Does Finkelstein’s message of hate enhance or diminish our academic standards and community? And is it legitimate for CJME, a Stanford funded student organization, to offer its uncritical, enthusiastic endorsement to a man who defames an entire people and its six million murdered innocents purely for the purpose of making Israel look bad?
BRIT MUSLIMS PREVENT HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY
Bolton bans Holocaust Day
The Jewish Telegraph
January 26, 2007
www.jewishtelegraph.co.uk/man_1.html
In a move widely seen to be bowing to Muslim pressure, Bolton Council has scrapped its Holocaust Memorial Day event.
The council is to replace it with a Genocide Memorial Day in June. This is in line with the policy of the Muslim Council of Britain, which continues to boycott HMD and is asking for a Genocide Day, which will also mark “the ongoing genocide and human rights abuses of Palestinians” by Israelis.
The council decision was made in consultation with the town’s Interfaith Council.
But Rabbi Joseph Lever of United Synagogue who has participated in the Bolton event for around three years was not consulted on the decision. He said: “I mourn the fact that the Holocaust Memorial Day event will not take place in Bolton this year.”
Louis Rapaport, president of the Jewish Representative Council of Greater Manchester, was equally disappointed that the Jewish community was not consulted.
He said: “Bolton, alone of all the local authorities in our area, is not having an HMD event which is a government recommendation.” He added: “There may not be many Jews in Bolton but the day is supposed to have an educational message to the whole community.
“I can’t help feeling the decision was influenced by Bolton’s large Muslim community.”
Holocaust educator David Arnold said: “It is more than unfortunate that Bolton has seen fit to trivialise the remembrance of the Shoah.”
Mr Arnold regretted the intrusion of “politics” into the issue. He said: “It is entirely inappropriate and stems from a failure to understand the issues.”
SUBSTANTIAL RISE IN ANTI-SEMITIC INCIDENTS IN EUROPE IN 2006
Marked rise in attacks on Jews in Europe over the past year
By Amiram Barkat
Ha’aretz
January 29, 2007
Last year saw a substantial rise in the number of anti-Semitic incidents in Germany, Austria and the Scandinavian countries, according to the Global Forum Against Anti-Semitism.
In an annual press conference, the forum explained that 2006 was characterized by escalation in the number and violent nature of attacks on Jews, proliferation of Holocaust denial and increased comparison of Israel to the Nazi regime.
The Global Forum – a joint effort of the Jewish Agency, the Foreign Ministry and the Prime Minister’s Office – counted 360 anti-Semitic incidents in France in 2006, compared to 300 in 2005. In the United Kingdom, the report listed a yearly decrease from 321 incidents in 2005 to 312 incidents in 2006. Russia recorded 300 incidents in 2006 compared to 250 the preceding year, and Austria saw a jump from 50 incidents to 83 last year. The Scandinavian countries saw 53 incidents in 2006, substantially more than the previous year’s 35. The report cited a 60-percent rise in incidents in the Berlin area, although it did not include figures for all of Germany.
Spokesmen for the forum emphasized on Sunday the many difficulties in classifying and reporting anti-Semitic incidents that affect the accuracy of the figures, which are primarily valuable as indicators of trends in the countries examined.
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said on Sunday that national leaders abroad must understand that anti-Semitism is first and foremost their own problem.
Jewish Agency chair Zeev Bielski commented that, “Anti-Semitic phenomena in Europe are very grave and countries like France and England are struggling to handle them.”
January 2006 brought the shocking murder of French Jew Ilan Halimi. Bielski said Halimi’s mother has recently decided to bring her son’s remains to Israel for interment on the first anniversary of his death, next Friday in Jerusalem.
“There is no doubt the recent Lebanon war and the Qana incident led to the most severe incidents in the past decade,” said Jewish Agency official Amos Hermon.
The gravest incident related to the war was the shooting at the Jewish Federation Building in Seattle, Washington last July, when staffer Pamela Waechter was killed and three other people were critically wounded.
The war engendered a wave of criticism in which Israel’s deeds were compared to those of Nazi Germany. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez claimed last August that Israeli aggression in Lebanon was “reminiscent of Hitler’s fascist manner.”
Montreal Mayor Stefane Gendron said in August that “Israelis are modern-day Nazis.”
An editorial cartoon in a Norwegian newspaper showed Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as the sadistic SS officer depicted in the movie “Schindler’s List.” Hermon noted that Norwegian author Jostein Gaarder included elements of historical Christian anti-Semitism in his book “God’s Chosen People,” including statements such as, “Don’t worry, Israel will go to exile again,” and, “We laugh at the idea that God chose one people ... gave them stupid stone tablets and a license to kill.”
Other serious incidents in 2006 included the stabbing of synagogue-goers at the Chabad Center in Moscow in January. In a September shooting attack on an Oslo synagogue, no one was injured. The attackers were Islamic extremists who were aided by the extreme right; they had also planned to kidnap the Israeli ambassador, Miriam Shomrat.
Various reports were published in European nations during the year revealing the scope and severity of anti-Semitism. A British parliamentary commission determined that Islamists and the radical left were responsible for increased anti-Semitism in the country. Research published in Germany indicated widespread use of anti-Semitic expressions in schools, primarily by Muslim students. Research in the Ukraine found that about a third of the country’s citizens had negative opinions of Jews.
ILAN HALIMI TO BE BURIED IN JERUSALEM
Murdered Frenchman Halimi to be buried in Jerusalem next month
By Sandra Calme
European Jewish Press
January 21, 2007
Ilan Halimi, the 23-year-old Jewish man whose atrocious murder a year ago shocked France, will be buried in Jerusalem on 9 February.
In what police are now admitting was an anti-Semitic attack, Halimi was kidnapped in January last year and then tortured for three weeks before being left to die.
His body will leave France for Israel on an El Al plane on 8 February.
Meanwhile, the French Jewish community will offer a Sefer Torah (Torah scroll) in memory of Halimi during a ceremony Sunday 28 January in the Rue St-Lazare Paris synagogue in the presence of politicians, leaders of the community and his family.
The Sefer Torah will be sent to the Western Wall in Jerusalem two days after his burial.
In another memorial, a forest will be planted in his name in Israel.
Halimi, a cellular phone salesman, went missing on 21 January 2006 after apparently having been lured into a sex-trap by a young woman who came to the shop where he worked in centre of Paris.
He was held and tortured for three weeks in an apartment estate in Bagneux, a poor multi-ethnic suburb, by a gang that sent ransom demands to Ilan’s family.
The kidnappers sent a photo of Ilan via the internet with death threats but failed to arrive at several meetings to collect the ransom from the young man’s relatives.
Halimi died shortly after being found critically wounded, naked and hand-cuffed along a railway track in the suburb of Sainte-Genevieve des Bois, 30 kilometres south of Paris. He was tortured and left with burn marks over four-fifths of his body.
A group who called themselves the “gang of the Barbarous” claimed responsibility for the murder.
The gang’s head, Youssouf Fofana, a 25-year-old French petty criminal of Ivorian origin, was arrested in early March 2006 in the Ivory Coast and extradited to France.
Fofana’s gang apparently used young women as bait to lure their victims, and were suspected of being behind two other extortion rackets that involved threatening doctors, businessmen and minor celebrities.
During police questioning the man who was called the “brain of the barbarians” is reported to have said the gang had targeted Halimi because they presumed Jews were wealthy.
Still today he reportedly expresses no feeling of remorse for Halimi’s heinous kidnapping and murder which was carried out “for money”.
Halimi’s horrific death traumatised the country with its brutality and unsettled the Jewish community, which staged a massive march against racism and anti-Semitism.
After initial reluctance, French authorities have said they believe anti-Semitism was part of the gang’s motives.
In spite of her pain, Ruth Halimi, Ilan’s mother, spoke to the media this week one year after the tragedy.
She called on the French government to take measures to get young people, whatever their religion, be taught essentials values, particularly within the family environment.
IRVING: AT AUSCHWITZ THEY DID NOT HAVE GAS CHAMBERS
Irving denies gas chambers existed at Auschwitz
Holocaust denier says Auschwitz was a tourist attraction, there was no proof it ever had gas chambers
The Associated Press
January 25, 2007
www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3356641,00.html
British historian David Irving, who was jailed for questioning the Holocaust in a book published in Austria, said Friday that the Auschwitz death camp was a tourist attraction, and added that there was no proof that it ever had gas chambers.
Irving, whose comments during an interview with Italy’s Sky TG24 News were immediately picked up by Italian news agencies, said there was no doubt the Nazis killed millions of Jews, but said the killings did not take place at Auschwitz.
“At Auschwitz they did not have gas chambers, or at least there is no proof that I am satisfied with,” Irving told the news channel’s program, “controcorrente.” Irving spoke in English, but his comments were translated by a voiceover.
Irving was sentenced in February 2006 to three years under a 1992 Austrian law that applies to “whoever denies, grossly plays down, approves or tries to excuse” the Nazi genocide or other Nazi crimes against humanity in a print publication, broadcast or other media.
He was released last month after Vienna’s highest court granted his appeal and converted two-thirds of his three-year sentence into probation. He has been indefinitely banned from Austria. The Italian government will propose legislation this week making it a crime to deny the Holocaust.
HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL IN BERLIN USED AS A PUBLIC LAVATORY BY TOURISTS
Holocaust memorials defiled by neo-Nazis
By Roger Boyes
The Times (of London)
January 30, 2007
www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2573340,00.html#cid=OTC-RSS&attr=World
The German authorities were preparing for criticism from the Jewish community after it was revealed that a Holocaust memorial in Berlin was being used as a public lavatory by tourists and by neo-Nazi sympathisers.
The disclosure, in a Berlin newspaper, will trigger a new debate about how the Holocaust should be remembered in Germany.
One argument against building the monument – that consists of 2,700 concrete slabs resembling Jewish gravestones – was that it would become a target of anti-Semitic vandals. The managers of the memorial, which attracts 3.5 million visitors a year, have tried to play down the scandal.
“This just belongs to the teething problems of any new monument,” Uwe Neumaerker, of the Memorial Foundation, said. The German Government has been aware of the problem since the monument was completed in May 2005 but has tried to maintain a silence for fear of encouraging more vandalism.
The defacing of Jewish memorial areas in Germany by followers of the far Right has become a widespread problem that is acknowledged rarely.
On the eve of Holocaust Day at the weekend a group of youths set fire to a restored railway carriage – symbolising the deportation of the Jews – in Lower Saxony. In the eastern German port of Stralsund, concrete was poured over a memorial for a Jewish family, the Keibel-Cohns.
A court in Frankfurt an der Oder, on the Polish border, sentenced three youths to between nine and 14 months jail this month for urinating on a Jewish memorial.
NOTE ON EILAT BOMBING
Yesterday’s dispatch was not delivered by some servers. It can be read here. It was also linked to by several other sites such as www.honestreporting.co.uk/articles/critiques/BBC_Under_Fire.asp
and adloyada.typepad.com/adloyada/2007/01/will_the_real_p.html and littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=24201_And_Again&only.
There was some disgraceful misreporting by certain correspondents for CNN International and BBC World Service yesterday. In covering the Eilat suicide bomb, they insinuated that the 30 Palestinians that have been killed in recent days were killed by Israel (when in fact none of them were) and thereby suggested that the Eilat bomb was some kind of justifiable revenge.
A PAKISTANI VICTIM
The report on CNN about the suicide bombing in Pakistan which came after the one about the suicide bombing in Israel was a straight news report. The suicide bomber in Pakistan, who killed a policeman, was referred to as a terrorist (unlike the bomber of civilians in Israel) and CNN made no kind of phony apologetics for the perpetrators in Pakistan. No qualifications. No additions. Just straight reporting.
A “GREAT HERO”
The murdered Israelis (as not mentioned on CNN or BBC) were aged 26, 27 and 32. The explosives were Soviet-made (of a kind that are widespread in Gaza and were purchased with international aid money donated to the Palestinian Authority). The parents of the bomber told Palestinian media today that their son was a “great hero.” His brother added: “Nothing can be more glorious than for him to become a Shahid (martyr). We are all so happy that Allah gave him this privilege.”
The target of the bomber was a much more crowded location in downtown Eilat rather than the bakery that he blew himself up in as the police closed in on him. For more on the dramatic events leading up to the bomb, please see the final article in this dispatch below: “Driver who picked up terrorist considered running him over” (Ha’aretz, Jan. 30, 2007).
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has said he will not order any significant military response to the suicide bombing in Eilat and Israel will maintain its ceasefire despite the rain of Qassam rockets being fired from Gaza into Israel.
-- Tom Gross
CONTENTS
1. Saddam’s victims, and Hitler’s
2. The first Arab to be named as a Righteous Gentile
3. For some Haifa residents, “The war that hasn’t ended”
4. The Julius Hirsch stadium
5. “Iraq learns from Yad Vashem” (Yediot Ahronot, Jan. 24, 2007)
6. “Holocaust honour for Arab who saved Jews from Nazis” (UK Times, Jan. 24, 2007)
7. Haifa Univ. study of impact of Lebanon war on Holocaust survivors (Jan. 21, 2007)
8. “Exhibition reveals secret history of Nazi sex slaves” (Independent, Jan. 24, 2007)
9. “Berlin stadium named for Jewish athlete” (JTA, Jan. 23, 2007)
10. “Yad Vashem to collect names from FSU” (Jerusalem Post, Jan. 27, 2007)
11. “Holocaust remembered in Greek city where Jews once thrived” (AP, Jan. 29, 2007)
12. “Driver who picked up terrorist considered running him over” (Ha’aretz, Jan. 30, 2007)
This dispatch concerns the Holocaust. The next dispatch will deal with contemporary anti-Semitism. Remembrance of the Holocaust and contemporary Holocaust denial (which in the Middle East is often state-sponsored) form an important backdrop to attitudes on Israel in the Muslim and wider world, which is why I occasionally include articles on this subject on this list / website.
SADDAM’S VICTIMS, AND HITLER’S
The first article below, from Israel’s best-selling newspaper Yediot Ahronot, reports that “members of an Iraqi organization planning to perpetuate the memory of thousands of Saddam Hussein’s victims secretly visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington and the Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem last year.”
The special team has been recording testimonies of survivors who managed to escape Saddam’s atrocities. Thirty members of it also met in the U.S. with Hollywood film director Steven Spielberg, who for many years has been documenting Holocaust survivors’ testimonies.
The head of the Iraqi memorial team, Dr Kenan Makiya, a lecturer at Harvard University who divides his time between Baghdad and Boston, says that while “it is hard to make a comparison between the Iraqi victims and the Holocaust of Jews in Europe, there are some common denominators”. “Saddam treated some of his people in the same way Hitler treated the Jews. In both cases it was a tragedy, and in both cases there were innocent victims.”
THE FIRST ARAB TO BE NAMED AS A RIGHTEOUS GENTILE
This is a follow-up to the dispatch The Holocaust’s Arab heroes (& Polish righteous Gentile recommended for Nobel Prize) (Oct. 11, 2006).
Khaled Abdelwahhab, a wealthy Tunisian landowner, is poised to become the first Arab to be officially named a Righteous Gentile. The award, presented by Yad Vashem, is granted to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. Among the most famous persons to receive this honor are Raoul Wallenberg and Oskar Schindler.
Abdelwahhab rescued 23 Tunisian Jews as they sheltered in an olive oil factory after being thrown out of their homes by German soldiers. He feared that the women were going to be put to work in a brothel and gave them sanctuary for the remaining six months of the German occupation.
The story of Abdelwahhab was uncovered by Robert Satloff who was writing a book titled “Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust’s Long Reach into Arab Lands.”
In the Times of London article (attached below), Satloff comments that “These stories are only coming to light now because we haven’t looked too hard before at the Holocaust experience in Arab countries. But another reason is that Arabs who did save Jews didn’t want to be found. They are reluctant to admit that they saved Jews.”
FOR SOME HAIFA RESIDENTS, “THE WAR THAT HASN’T ENDED”
Researchers at the University of Haifa have found “relatively high levels of depression, somatization and loneliness among Holocaust survivors who were residents of Haifa and northern Israel during last summer’s war with Hizbullah.”
The findings were presented by the Center for Research and Study of Aging at the University of Haifa at a recent conference entitled “The War That Hasn’t Ended – Holocaust Survivors in Traumatic Situations in Israel.”
The survey found that common responses to the researchers’ questions were: “I keep taking tranquilizers,” “I don’t have anything to live for,” “If I had the courage, I would kill myself.”
In addition the study “demonstrated the need for organizing and developing a program specifically for elderly Holocaust survivors that will answer their basic functional and emotional needs.”
THE JULIUS HIRSCH STADIUM
A new exhibit at the former Ravensbrück concentration camp’s museum, north of Berlin breaks a taboo on how hundreds of (mainly non-Jewish) women, written off as “antisocial elements” by the Nazis, were arrested, dispatched to camps and forced to work as prostitutes for slave laborers during the Third Reich. The exhibition reveals how the SS delighted in making lesbians work as prostitutes in an attempt to “convert” them. For more, see the fourth article below, from the Independent.
The fifth article below reports that a Berlin stadium has been renamed after a German Jewish soccer star who was murdered in Auschwitz. The Am Eichkamp stadium in West Berlin will now be called the Julius Hirsch stadium. Hirsch was a star player early in the 20th century and a member of the 1912 German Olympic team in Stockholm.
The sixth article reports that “Yad Vashem and the Israeli Immigrant Absorption Ministry have embarked on a project to record the names of Soviet-era Jews who perished in the Holocaust.” Yad Vashem currently has 3.1 million names of Jewish Holocaust victims in its database, of which only 350,000 are of Soviet Jews. It is estimated that only 20 percent of the victims from Soviet areas have been recorded, as opposed to about 80 percent from Western European countries and about 40 percent from nations like Hungary, Poland and Romania.
The seventh article below concerns Sunday’s tribute Sunday to tens of thousands of Greek Jews killed by the Nazis. Greek Jews suffered some of the worst massacres anywhere in the twentieth century. Among the perpetrators was Kurt Waldheim, later appointed as UN Secretary-General and voted Austrian president even after his full role in the Holocaust was exposed. Anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism are still widespread in Greece today, even though few Jews remain.
For more on Waldheim, see: UN paying disgraced Waldheim $125,000 per year (Oct. 14, 2002).
-- Tom Gross
“SADDAM TREATED SOME OF HIS PEOPLE IN THE SAME WAY HITLER TREATED THE JEWS”
Iraq learns from Yad Vashem
Members of Iraqi team perpetuating memory of Saddam Hussein’s crimes secretly visit Yad Vashem
By Smadar Perry
Yediot Ahronot
January 24, 2007
www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3355792,00.html
Members of an Iraqi organization planning to perpetuate the memory of thousands of Saddam Hussein’s victims secretly visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington and the Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem last year, Yediot Ahronot can reveal.
The report noted that a special team of Iraqi exiles has for the past year been recording testimonies of survivors who managed to escape Saddam’s atrocities. One of the most prominent testimonies among the hundreds recorded for the planned Iraqi memorial museum, is the one by Avrahan Moshli from Baghdad, an elderly businessman who was apprehended, tortured and who managed to escape and flee to Europe.
It also became known that the 30 members of the Iraqi memorial team met with Jewish film director Steven Spielberg, who is also documenting Holocaust survivors’ testimonies.
During their visit to Israel about a year ago, a member of the Iraqi team met with families of former Iraqis residing in Israel. The head of the Iraqi memorial team, Dr Kenan Makiya who arrived in Israel escorted by two other persons, is lecturer at the Harvard University and he lives in Baghdad and the US.
“It is hard for me to make a comparison between the stories of the Iraqi victims and the Holocaust of Jews in Europe,” Makiya said.
“Yet, there are common denominators,” he added, “Saddam treated some of his people in the same way Hitler treated the Jews. In both cases it was a tragedy, and in both cases there were innocent victims.”
“HE WOULD BE THE FIRST ARAB TO BECOME A RIGHTEOUS AMONG THE NATIONS”
Holocaust honour for Arab who saved Jews from Nazis
By David Sharrock
The Times (of London)
January 24, 2007
www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2562887,00.html
An Arab who saved the lives of two dozen Jews during the Holocaust is about to receive an unprecedented honour from Israel. Khaled Abdelwahhab, a wealthy Tunisian landowner, is poised to become the first Arab to be celebrated as a Righteous Gentile.
The award, presented by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance authority, is granted to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust in which six million died.
More than 21,000 people have been granted the title of Righteous Among the Nations since it was established in 1963, with Oskar Schindler probably the best known. But, in spite of stories of heroism and friendship recorded by members of North Africa’s once-large Jewish community, no candidate has emerged from the Arab Muslim world.
The story of Khaled Abdelwahhab was uncovered by an American Jewish expert on Arab and Islamic politics who was researching for a book.
A survivor told Robert Satloff that Abdelwahhab had rescued 23 Jews, including her family, as they sheltered in an olive oil factory after being thrown out of their homes by German soldiers. He feared that the women were going to be put to work in a brothel and gave them sanctuary for the remaining six months of the German occupation.
Interviewed at her home in Los Angeles a few weeks before her death, Anny Boukris said that Abdelwahhab had discovered that German officers were planning to take her mother, Odette, to work in the brothel they had set up in Mahdia, on the east coast of Tunisia.
Abdelwahhab’s father was a good friend of the Boukris family, so he drove straight to the olive oil factory and told all the Jews sheltering there that their lives were in danger and that they must go with him immediately.
He settled them all at his family farm in the village of Tlelsa, 20 miles from Mahdia, and they remained there until British troops ended the German occupation in April 1943.
Abdelwahhab was 32 when the Germans arrived in Tunisia and was described by Dr Satloff as a bon vivant, blessed with Hollywood film-star looks – and an eye for the ladies. His father was a former minister to the court of the Tunisian bey [sovereign].
Abdelwahhab studied art and architecture in New York and lived for a time in Paris. He married a Venezuelan opera singer in Spain and she became the mother of one of his two daughters. He died in 1997 at the age of 86.
Estee Yaari, of Yad Vashem, told The Times that a file on Abdelwahhab had been opened and would be considered by a commission of experts led by a supreme court judge. “It looks as if there is enough material to move this forward and he would be the first Arab to become a Righteous Among the Nations,” she said.
Dr Satloff, executive director of the Institute for Near East studies in Washington, uncovered the story of Abdelwahhab’s heroism while working on a book that he hoped would break “the conspiracy of silence” in the Arab world surrounding the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust.
Dr Satloff, who flew to Israel to meet Yad Vashem officials yesterday, said: “These stories are only coming to light now because we haven’t looked too hard before at the Holocaust experience in Arab countries. But another reason is that Arabs who did save Jews didn’t want to be found. They are reluctant to admit that they saved Jews.”
More than 1.5 million Jews lived in northern Africa during the Second World War and were subject to persecution by the Nazis and their allies there, although few were sent to the death camps in Europe.
HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS IN TRAUMATIC SITUATIONS IN ISRAEL
University of Haifa study of impact of Lebanon war on Holocaust survivors
Press Release
January 21, 2007
Research at the Center for Research and Study of Aging at the University of Haifa reveals:
A quarter of the Holocaust survivors living in northern Israel that were released from hospitalization shortly before the war were in immediate need of help during the Second Lebanon War, but the some of the local authorities were unaware of their needs.
Researchers found relatively high levels of depression, somatization and loneliness among Holocaust survivors who were residents of Haifa and northern Israel during this summer’s war. The research was conducted by Prof. Ariela Lowenstein, Dr. Dana Parilutzky, Ms. Batya Rappaport and Ms. Dafna Halperin of the Center for Research and Study of Aging at the University of Haifa, conducted on behalf of the Foundation for the Welfare of Holocaust Survivors in Israel. The research was presented at a conference at the University of Haifa on January 18, 2007, entitled: “The War That Hasn’t Ended – Holocaust Survivors in Traumatic Situations in Israel”.
The study found a quarter of the survivors in immediate need of personal care at home, food or medicine. “The study demonstrated the need for organizing and developing a program specifically for elderly Holocaust survivors that will answer their basic functional and emotional needs,” stated Prof. Lowenstein, head of the Center for Research and Study of Aging.
The Foundation for the Welfare of Holocaust Survivors in Israel provides services for Holocaust survivors after hospitalization. Following the Second Lebanon War, which was an especially traumatic event for the elderly survivors living in northern Israel, the foundation decided to initiate a survey to evaluate the emotional state of survivors who had recently been released from hospitals and outline their instrumental needs.
The survey identified three main areas of need: home care, medical care and medications and food supplies. Many home care workers left the area fearing the dangers of the Katyusha rockets. Many medical clinics were closed during the war, rendering medical care and medications inaccessible. The lack of mobility of some of these elderly survivors prevented them from acquiring adequate food supplies. About a third of the survivors found themselves living alone, unable to take care of their basic needs. The study found 25% of the survivors in immediate need of assistance and that the some of the local authorities were unaware of these needs. Following the survey, the Foundation for the Welfare of Holocaust Survivors in Israel promoted coordinated efforts with the municipalities, local associations for the aged and volunteers to provide immediate assistance to those in need.
The survey also found relatively high rates of, depression, somatization and loneliness among survey participants. Common responses to the researchers’ questions were: “I keep taking tranquilizers,” “I don’t have anything to live for,” “If I had the courage, I would kill myself.”
Prof. Lowenstein reported that researchers from the Center for Research and Study of Aging together with the Foundation for the Welfare of Holocaust Survivors in Israel are currently working on a program that will train professional teams to deal with the special needs of Holocaust survivors in traumatic situations, based on the findings of the survey.
EXHIBITION BREAKS TABOO ON NAZI SEX SLAVES
Exhibition reveals secret history of Nazi sex slaves
By Tony Paterson
The Independent
January 24, 2007
news.independent.co.uk/europe/article2180767.ece
There are no photographs and no names, just scores of faded brown index cards with anonymous prisoner numbers, dates of birth, and the hideously functional term “brothel woman” handwritten in black ink on the bottom right-hand corner of each form.
The files, stacked on desks in a former garage for SS guards at the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp museum in Germany, provide evidence about one of the most sordid but least known aspects of Nazi rule. They recall how hundreds of women, written of as “antisocial elements” by the Hitler regime, were arrested, dispatched to camps and forced to work as prostitutes for slave labourers during the Third Reich.
The plight of the hundreds of women who suffered this fate is the subject of an exhibition which opened last week at the former Ravensbrück camp’s museum, north of Berlin. It breaks a taboo on an issue which has remained a virtual secret since the end of the Second World War.
“Hardly any other part of concentration camp history has been so repressed and so tainted with prejudice and distortion,” said Insa Eschebach, the museum’s director. “The women prisoners who were forced to work as prostitutes remained silent after 1945. Hardly any applied for financial compensation because talking about their experiences was too degrading for them.”
Yet with the help of testimonies by former Ravensbrück prisoners, excerpts from Nazi SS files and accounts by camp guards, the exhibition manages to capture the horror and degradation suffered by the Third Reich’s sex slaves.
Antonia Bruhn, a former inmate at Ravensbrück, where most of the prostitutes were recruited, recalls in a video interview how the women were lured with promises that they would be set free after six months, fed fresh food and vitamins and tanned with sun lamps to improve their looks. Unlike other women prisoners they were allowed to keep their hair. “After they were primped up, they were all tried out by a group of SS guards in the camp operating theatre. Then they were sent off to the concentration camps to work. Of course none of them were set free as the SS had promised.”
The women were forced to work at 10 camps, including Auschwitz, from 1942 until 1945. In special brothels equipped with tiny “copulation cells” the women were obliged to receive eight men a day and up to 40 each at weekends. Sex was only permitted lying down in 20-minute sessions and was controlled by SS guards who watched through spy holes.
Irma Trksak, another inmate, recalled the victims returning from a six-month stint at one camp. “They came back as wrecks. God knows how many men they had had to sleep with. They were ruined, sick and many died afterwards,” she said.
The idea was conceived by Heinrich Himmler, the Nazi SS chief, as an incentive for slave labourers. But it was also designed to combat the spread of homosexuality in all-male labour camps. German prisoners were the chief beneficiaries.
The exhibition reveals how the SS delighted in making lesbians work as prostitutes in an attempt to “convert” them. Homosexuals were also forcibly sent to have sex with prostitutes.
On their return many of the prostitutes were subjected to medical experiments and several died as a result.
BERLIN STADIUM NAMED AFTER JULIUS HIRSCH
Berlin stadium named for Jewish athlete
Jewish Telegraph Agency
January 23, 2007
A Berlin stadium was renamed after a German Jewish soccer star who died in Auschwitz.
In ceremonies on Sunday, the Am Eichkamp stadium in former West Berlin was dedicated to Julius Hirsch.
The decision was prompted by an incident in April 2006 when Jewish Maccabi athletes from four countries took part in the European Maccabi Football Trophy there.
The Berlin Maccabi team had wanted their home stadium to be named for Hirsch, but local sport associations opposed the idea, saying Hirsch had nothing to do with the location and in fact never played in Berlin.
Hirsch, a star player early in the 20th century, was a member of the 1912 German Olympic team in Stockholm.
After the Nazis came to power in 1933, his athletic feats were erased from the record books. Hirsch was killed in 1943.
YAD VASHEM TO RECORD NAMES OF SOVIET JEWISH VICTIMS OF NAZIS
Yad Vashem to collect names from FSU
By Amir Mizroch
The Jerusalem Post
January 27, 2007
Yad Vashem and the Immigrant Absorption Ministry have embarked on a project to record the names of Soviet-era Jews who perished in the Holocaust.
Their emissaries will spend a month attempting to visit the roughly one million Russian immigrants in Israel to create a database of names, the ministry said.
Immigrant Absorption Minister Ze’ev Boim said there was a need to “knock on every door” to ask for information about the people who were murdered in Nazi-occupied Soviet territory during World War II.
The “Immortalization Month” campaign aims to gather as many names as possible of the hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews who perished. Yad Vashem has 3.1 million names of Jewish Holocaust victims in its database, of which only 350,000 names belong to Soviet Jews.
The Nazis and their collaborators murdered six million Jews. The low proportion of victims from the Soviet Union whose names have been recorded led Yad Vashem and the ministry to launch the campaign.
According to the ministry, only 20 percent of the victims from Soviet areas have been recorded, as opposed to about 80% from Western European countries and about 40% from nations like Hungary, Poland and Romania.
For example, Yad Vashem has the names of only 7,000 Jews murdered at Babi Yar in the Ukraine, although it is known that some 33,000 Jews were murdered there.
Boris Maftzir, who heads the project for Yad Vashem, lists several reasons for the dearth of recorded names from the former Soviet Union.
During Soviet times it was impossible to commemorate and document the Holocaust, and there was no access to archival material. In addition, the large migration of Soviet Jews in the ’90s hampered efforts to collect information about those who perished, Maftzir says.
Another reason names were not readily accessible, according to Maftzir, was that the Germans had only begun to develop their systematic killing machine when they invaded these areas, and, despite tallying the number of dead, did not document their victims’ names.
To date, Yad Vashem has collected the names of 30,000 victims from Jews living in Russia and the Ukraine. Only several thousand names have been documented as a result of questioning Russian-language immigrants in Israel. Yad Vashem estimates that many of the missing 3,000,000 names are of Jews from Soviet lands.
The project will be conducted during February all over the country, especially in areas with large concentrations of immigrants from the former Soviet Union. They will be presented with a “Witness Document” questionnaire.
Officials from the ministry will focus on its branch offices, immigrant centers, clubs, housing projects, libraries, local authorities, as well as working through immigrant organizations.
The questionnaires, which will collect biographical information about victims from the general public, survivors and the families of victims, will be collated and kept in the hall of names at Yad Vashem.
The Absorption Ministry is also recruiting dozens of volunteers from the immigrant community to conduct interviews with survivors and relatives of victims.
PAYING TRIBUTE TO THE DEAD OF “THE PEARL OF ISRAEL”
Holocaust remembered in Greek city where Jews once thrived
The Associated Press
January 29, 2007
www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1167467836979&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Families of Holocaust survivors paid tribute Sunday to thousands of Greek Jews killed by the Nazis during World War II.
“It is our duty to help future generations by promoting values such as respect for human rights, freedom and solidarity and keeping away from hate and intolerance,” said David Saltiel, the president of the Jewish community in Thessaloniki.
Nearly 90 percent of Greece’s 80,000 Jews were wiped out during the Holocaust. Most of them had lived in this port city once known as the pearl of Israel. Some 1,500 Greek Jews live in Thessaloniki today.
“It created a dent in the city’s demography with whole neighborhoods losing their inhabitants,” said Zanet Battinou, Director of the Jewish Museum in Athens. “These are communities that will not recover from this”.
Many Greek Jews trace their origins back to Sephardic ancestors that took refuge in Thessaloniki after being driven out of Spain in 1492.
The Greek government said International Holocaust Day – formally marked on Saturday – should serve as a strong warning against the danger of racism and against similar atrocities ever taking place again.
“The right to remember and educate generations to come on the Holocaust is evident and nonnegotiable,” Foreign Minister Dora Bakoyannis said Friday. “It constitutes an underlying condition for avoiding similar genocides in the future.”
A vigil was held on Sunday at the city’s Holocaust monument, followed by speeches by the government officials and the head of Thessaloniki’s Jewish community.
Battinou said Holocaust remembrance remains important, to remind Greeks “there are no solutions so bleak that we cannot do the right thing.”
She added: “We must always find the strength to do what is right (as) values such as democracy and freedom can easily slip from our fingers.”
Greece was occupied by Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1944. The Greek national resistance took on the Jewish cause, organizing safety routes up to the mountains and out to the Middle East.
January 27, the Holocaust Remembrance Day, marks the day in 1945 when the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp – where more than 1.5 million people perished, most of them Jewish – was liberated by Soviet troops.
EILAT DRIVER PLACED IN TERRIBLE DILEMMA
Driver who picked up terrorist considered running him over
By Nir Hasson
Ha’aretz
January 30, 2007
www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/819149.html
“I determined where he would get out, I determined that these people would be killed rather than others,” said Yossi Voltinsky, the man who drove the suicide bomber in yesterday’s attack in Eilat and let him off a few minutes before he exploded. Voltinsky was “99 percent sure” his passenger was a suicide bomber. He considered crashing his car or running over the man but did not “because of the 1 percent chance that maybe he was innocent, maybe a crazy, how would I be able to live with that?” Voltinsky said.
Voltinsky, an internal auditor for the Isrotel hotel chain and a lieutenant colonel (Res.), met the terrorist a few minutes after leaving his home in northern Eilat. “I saw a man dressed in red, I didn’t think about him, I often give rides to guys to the hotel area. As soon as I looked at him in the rearview mirror, I saw that something was wrong - he wore a windbreaker zipped to the neck, with a big backpack strapped on. He kept one hand in his pocket, his eyes darted around, he was very nervous. He acted very unnaturally. I asked him where he was headed, he didn’t answer, just motioned for me to keep going. I asked, ‘Where are you from?’ He didn’t answer. I realized at that point I was transporting a hostile person, a terrorist or a robber.”
Voltinsky decided to take a detour to keep the terrorist from reaching a crowded area. “I couldn’t drive to the police station because it’s inside the city, and I didn’t want to go to a checkpoint because I knew that as soon as he saw soldiers, he’d blow up,” Voltinsky said.
A few minutes later, after Voltinsky again asked the man where he wanted to go, he answered, “Haifa.”
“He had a strong Arab accent, I knew he wasn’t Bedouin, I began speeding up to make him suspicious of me. I drove to a remote area and released my seat belt so I could move if I needed to. He sensed everything I did and sat up straight. I thought about using my phone, I was 99 percent sure he was a terrorist.” That was when Voltinsky considered flipping his car over, but then the man motioned for him to stop.
Voltinsky let the man out at the outskirts of the city, about a kilometer from the site of the bombing, and called the police with a description of the man. He tried following him, but lost his trail. A few minutes later the police called Voltinsky to tell him about the explosion and ask him to come and identify the terrorist.
“It was only then that I realized that others were killed. I saw the bodies minutes after the explosion. It is a horrible feeling.”
MURDER IN EILAT
Although this morning’s suicide bomb attack in the Israeli southern resort town of Eilat (which killed at least three people) was the first in Israel for some time, the international media is this morning failing to note that dozens of other would-be bombers have been prevented from entering other parts of Israel in recent months due to Israel’s security fence. The media reports today have also failed to note that rockets continue to be fired almost daily into Israel from the Gaza strip.
Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades are among those groups that have claimed responsibility for this morning’s murders in Eilat. The U.S. government, European Union and the government of Ehud Olmert have all recently given money to Fatah. Israeli Police are currently searching for other bombers believed to be on the loose in the Eilat area.
A Hamas spokesman called this morning’s attack on ordinary Israelis “natural”.
The Palestinian Maan news just announced in Arabic that the suicide bomber is Mohammed Fasial al-Saqsaq, aged 21 from Gaza: www.maannews.net/ar/index.php
And in the last few minutes on the main webpage of Fatah, the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, together with al-Quds Brigades and the “Army of Believers” claimed “full responsibility” for the attack and declared that al-Saqsaq is a “hero Shahid (martyr)”: www.kataebaqsa1.com/arabic/index.php. (Please note the photo of Yasser Arafat alongside the announcement.)
-- Tom Gross
CONTENTS
1. GCC would support U.S. strike on Iran
2. Bernard Lewis: No earthly deterrence against Iranian regime
3. U.S. presidential candidates talk tough on Iran
4. Rafsanjani: Iran should give up its nuclear program
5. Israel “drafting a strategy to join NATO”
6. Hizbullah officially opens an Iraqi wing
7. Diplomatic sources: Iranian spies killed former Egyptian ambassador in Iraq
8. IDF destroys two Hizbullah bunkers within Israeli territory
9. Lebanese army hesitates against Hizbullah
10. IDF: Olmert govt. won’t let us stop Hizbullah from rearming
11. Massive international aid for Lebanon
12. U.S. troops authorized to kill Iranian operatives in Iraq
13. Netanyahu asks U.S. pension funds to quit Iran
14. “Russia committed to Iran nuclear plant launch: Ivanov” (AFP, Jan. 28, 2007)
15. “Russian city may be source for uranium” (AP, Jan. 27, 2007)
16. “Russia completes delivery of missiles to Iran” (Deutsche Welle radio, Jan. 23, 2007)
17. “Tor-M1 anti-aircraft missile delivery to Iran completed” (RIA Novosti, Jan. 23, 2007)
18. “N Korea helping Iran with nuclear testing” (Daily Telegraph, Jan. 24, 2007)
19. “Iran, Belarus sign defense agreement” (AFP, Jan. 23, 2007)
This dispatch contains items on recent developments concerning Iran and the Iranian proxy militia Hizbullah.
GCC WOULD SUPPORT U.S. STRIKE ON IRAN
The six Gulf Cooperation Council states would support a U.S. strike to destroy Iran’s nuclear weapons program, according to a new report by the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center. “Teheran has to finally realize that if push comes to shove, if the choice is between an Iranian nuclear bomb and a U.S. military strike, then the Arab Gulf states have no choice but to quietly support the U.S.,” the report said.
The report cited Iran’s military buildup in the Gulf and its refusal to negotiate the seizure of two small islands from the United Arab Emirates.
BERNARD LEWIS: NO EARTHLY DETERRENCE AGAINST IRANIAN REGIME
Prof. Bernard Lewis, of Princeton University, the world’s leading expert on Islam, told the IDC Herzliya security conference last week that Iranian president “Ahmadinejad truly believes in the apocalyptic message he is bringing. This makes him very dangerous. [The Cold War philosophy of] Mutual Assured Destruction, [which prevented the former Soviet Union and the United States from using the nuclear weapons they had targeted at each other,] would not apply to Ahmadinejad’s Iran,” said Lewis. “It is not a deterrent, but an inducement to him.”
U.S. PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES TALK TOUGH ON IRAN
Several declared and potential U.S. Presidential hopefuls spoke out strongly against Iran’s nuclear program at the IDC Herzliya security conference (which I attended) last week.
Republicans Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and John McCain, and Democrat John Edwards, all pledged in no uncertain terms that they would not allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons.
Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts and potential contender for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, said, “Iran must be stopped, Iran can be stopped, and Iran will be stopped.” He also called for economic sanctions on Iran that are “at least as severe” as those imposed on South Africa during its apartheid era. He compared the challenge posed by Iran and militant Islam to the great threats of the 20th century – fascism and totalitarian communism. He also recommended that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad be brought before an international court and tried for threatening genocide.
Gingrich said Israel faced the most serious threat to its existence since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. But many in Israel and the United States do not fully appreciate the nature, size and scope of the Iranian threat, he said.
McCain, the presidential front-runner, said he supported exploring a strengthening of ties between Israel and NATO as a means of easing Israel’s insecurity. “Military action is not our preference. It remains, as it always must, a last option,” McCain said. But he added, “There is only one thing worse than a military solution, and that is a nuclear armed Iran.”
Edwards, the only Democratic presidential candidate to address the conference, similarly called for tougher sanctions on Iran and held out the threat of military force, but he broke with the others by suggesting that Washington open a dialogue with Iran. He added that stopping Iran from developing nuclear weapons “is the greatest challenge of our generation.”
RAFSANJANI: IRAN SHOULD GIVE UP ITS NUCLEAR PROGRAM
Former Iranian president Hashemi Rafsanjani said in an interview with the British newspaper, The Guardian, last Friday that his country should give up its nuclear program in order to avoid the risk of a confrontation with the United States or Israel and the collapse of the Islamic regime.
He said he was trying to persuade the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the final say in state matters, that further negotiations are essential to avoid a potentially disastrous conflict with the U.S. or Israel.
ISRAEL “DRAFTING A STRATEGY TO JOIN NATO”
In an effort to establish more effective deterrence in the face of Iran’s race to obtain nuclear weapons, Israeli government ministries are, for the first time, working on drafting a position paper that will include a strategy for turning Israel into a full-fledged member of NATO.
The paper is being drafted by an interministerial committee made up of representatives from the Defense Ministry and the Foreign Ministry and headed by the National Security Council. It plans to complete its paper by the end of February and present it to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert for approval.
At the Herzliya conference last week, former Spanish prime minister Jose Aznar said that “Israel, Australia and Japan should be asked to join NATO as soon as possible.” Aznar said that NATO needed to change its focus to counter the growing threat of global terrorism.
He added that Israel joining NATO would help deter Iran. (For more on this, see this article, in which I am quoted on this matter: www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3355577,00.html)
But the editor and publisher of German weekly paper Die Zeit, Josef Joffe, (who is also a subscriber to this email list) said he believed joining NATO would restrict Israel militarily. He said that NATO would likely make such restrictions a requirement for membership. “With that in mind, why would Israel want to join NATO?” he asked.
“From a technical perspective, Israel would make a wonderful partner for NATO. It would beat anything the Europeans could field. But from a rational perspective, would NATO leaders want to fight Israel’s wars? What NATO country wants to put its soldiers in Israel?”
HIZBULLAH OFFICIALLY OPENS AN IRAQI WING
The following two items were translated from Arabic especially for this email list:
The Saudi daily al-Watan reported that Hizbullah has strengthened its official presence in Iraq, by opening three offices in the center and north of the country under the name “The Iraqi Hizbullah”. According to the newspaper, Iraqi political sources say that the offices were opened in the al-Nassiriyah, Diyala and al-Najaf provinces. The newspaper says there is a wide basis of support and popularity in Iraq for the Lebanese Hizbullah following their “victory” over Israel, and their having previously trained Iraqi militias (as detailed in the past on this email list/website).
The Iraqi Hizbullah, ends the report, is led by Hassan al-Sari, the Iraqi Minister of State, and is one of the strongest groups that make up the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq, headed by Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim. It centers its activity in the northern provinces of the country.
[1] Source: www.al-Watan.com.sa/daily/2007-01-18/first_page/first_page03.htm
[2] For a map of the global reach of Hizbullah (now a bit out of date, but still worth looking at), please visit – www.intelligence.org.il/sp/hizbullah/hizbu_ag.doc
[3] Al-Watan is a leading reformist newspaper in Saudi Arabia. It received some notoriety when its editor, Jamal Kashoggi, was fired for speaking out against the country’s hardline Islamist clerics because they refused to denounce the May 2003 Riyadh compound bombings.
[4] Hizbullah in Iraq’s website, which has been located by this email list/website, and appears to still be under construction as not all the parts work yet, is: www.algalibon.com. According to the site, Hizbullah now has offices in all six provinces of Iraq.
DIPLOMATIC SOURCES: IRANIAN SPIES KILLED FORMER EGYPTIAN AMBASSADOR IN IRAQ
Yesterday’s edition (Sunday, 28 January 2007) of al-Watan, reported the following:
“Diplomatic sources from the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram have revealed that Iranian intelligence was behind the killing of Ihab al-Sherif, Egypt’s former ambassador to Iraq. Sharif had been appointed ambassador to Iraq, and arrived on June 1, 2005. He was kidnapped five weeks later on July 3. His abductors killed him four days after he was seized.
“In light of this, the diplomatic sources said, the Egyptian, Jordanian and Gulf States would be even more supportive of the new American plan to send more troops to Iraq, which they said was justified. They pointed out that the Egyptian support of the plan did not arise out of a vacuum. It would help rescue Muslims, who are our brothers, and victims of ethnic cleansing, particularly in Baghdad, at the hands of armed militias.”
IDF DESTROYS TWO HIZBULLAH BUNKERS WITHIN ISRAELI TERRITORY
The Israel Defense Forces destroyed two Hizbullah bunkers on Friday. The bunkers had been located within internationally-recognized Israeli territory. One of the bunkers was discovered during the war with Hizbullah terrorists last summer in southern Lebanon, according to Ha’aretz. The other was discovered last Wednesday while soldiers were searching the Katamon Valley close to the border with Lebanon.
The two connected bunkers had been used by Hizbullah as a forward base for its attacks. Inside the bunkers Israel found food, shovels and other equipment. The bunkers were detonated in a controlled environment by IDF engineering forces. The goal of the search operation, said the IDF, was to prevent Hizbullah terrorists from returning to posts they manned before the recent war.
LEBANESE ARMY HESITATES AGAINST HIZBULLAH
Lebanese security forces have acknowledged that they have been slow in confronting Hizbullah’s efforts to paralyze the country. Officials acknowledged that Lebanese Army troops and security forces responded inadequately to Hizbullah’s latest anti-government campaign. They said Lebanese troops, many of them Shi’ites, ignored orders to prevent Hizbullah from blocking roads and services.
“There was either collusion [between Hizbullah and the security forces], dawdling or unclear decisions,” Lebanese Tourism Minister Joe Sarkis said.
The assessment came amid rising violence between anti- and pro-government factions in Lebanon. On Wednesday, dozens of people were injured in gun battles in Tripoli, Lebanon’s second largest city. On Thursday, riots between Sunni and Shi’ites in south Beirut left four dead and 152 injured, and prompted the Lebanese army to impose an overnight curfew for the first time in a decade. The Iranian-backed Hizbullah is seeking to bring down the pro-Western government.
Hizbullah supporters held up images of their leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah and burned those of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, whose assassination in 2005 triggered Lebanon’s latest political turmoil.
IDF: OLMERT GOVT. WON’T LET US STOP HIZBULLAH FROM REARMING
Israel’s political echelon has “tied the IDF’s hands” and is preventing military operations that could stop Hizbullah from rearming and gaining strength ahead of a possible new round of violence this summer, a high-ranking IDF officer told The Jerusalem Post on condition of anonymity.
According to the officer, the IDF is not responsible for the lack of action against Hizbullah – which Israeli intelligence says is receiving almost daily arms shipments from Syria – and the Israeli cabinet has decided the military should refrain from initiating operations to thwart the smuggling. The IDF believes that Hizbullah has restored its strength to the level it was at before last summer’s war.
Separately, Director of IDF Strategic Planning Brig.-Gen. Udi Dekel has said that Hizbullah was busy rearming, receiving “nonstop” weapons shipments from Syria. This was the first time a high-ranking IDF officer has publicly confirmed that Damascus is shipping weapons to Hizbullah. The weapons originated in Iran, he said.
MASSIVE INTERNATIONAL AID FOR LEBANON
At last Thursday’s international donors conference in Paris, billions of dollars in cash and loans were pledged to Lebanon. The United States has promised to triple its aid to some $770 million, France will give $650m, and the European Union itself will give $520m. Some 35 nations made pledges totaling $7.6 billion.
Saudi Arabia headed the list of donors with a promise of $1.1 billion. Of the American pledge of $770 million, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said $250 million will be “liquid cash assistance” and the rest will fund “projects.”
The UAE promised $300 million and the Arab Investment Bank $250 million. The Islamic Development Bank offered $250 million. Most European countries pledged to make generous individual contributions in addition to their EU donations.
The families of kidnapped Israel Defense Forces soldiers Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev asked French President Jacques Chirac to work with the donor countries to ensure that UN Security Council Resolution 1701 is implemented in full, and not just the clauses regarding rebuilding Lebanon. In a letter timed to coincide with the Paris opening of the conference, the families wrote: “We support the transfer of financial aid to rebuild Lebanon as agreed under 1701, but the same resolution also requires the immediate unconditional release of our sons... Our sons have been held in inhuman conditions by Hizbullah in overt violation of international law and the Geneva Convention for more than six months. We call on the donor nations: Don’t forget the part that calls for Udi and Eldad’s release.”
U.S. TROOPS AUTHORIZED TO KILL IRANIAN OPERATIVES IN IRAQ
The Bush administration has authorized the U.S. military to kill or capture Iranian operatives inside Iraq as part of an aggressive new strategy to weaken Teheran’s influence across the Middle East and compel it to give up its nuclear program, counterterrorism officials have told the Washington Post.
For more than a year, U.S. forces in Iraq have secretly detained dozens of suspected Iranian agents, holding them for three to four days at a time. The “catch and release” policy was designed to avoid escalating tensions with Iran while intimidating its emissaries.
Now senior administration officials decided that a more confrontational approach was necessary, as Iran’s regional influence grows and U.S. efforts to isolate Teheran appear to be failing. Iranian intelligence officers, plus members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Command, are believed to be active inside Iraq.
NETANYAHU ASKS U.S. PENSION FUNDS TO QUIT IRAN
Israel’s Likud opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu has asked one of the biggest U.S. pension funds to pull money out of companies doing business with Iran because of fears over Iran’s development of nuclear weapons.
“This allows you to use economic pressure that might obviate the need to use different measures,” former prime minister Netanyahu told reporters. Massachusetts Treasurer Tim Cahill and Michael Travaglini, executive director of the state’s $46 billion pension fund, said they would consider the request. Representatives of Rhode Island and New Hampshire, which have smaller pension funds, also attended the meeting.
Netanyahu was also due to meet with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose state’s Public Employees’ Retirement System, Calpers, manages the world’s biggest pension fund with $225 billion.
In the past, Massachusetts divested from South Africa and Northern Ireland over social and political issues.
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I attach six news reports about Iran below.
-- Tom Gross
RUSSIA COMMITTED TO IRAN NUCLEAR PLANT LAUNCH
Russia committed to Iran nuclear plant launch: Ivanov
Agence France-Presse (AFP)
January 28, 2007
Visiting Russian security chief Igor Ivanov said that Moscow is committed to launching Iran’s first nuclear power plant on schedule in September, the official IRNA news agency reported.
“Russia is determined and serious in fulfilling its obligation to finish Bushehr plant on the scheduled date,” Ivanov was quoted as saying today (January 28) after meeting Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki.
In September 2006, Russia and Iran signed an agreement setting September this year as the deadline for the launch of the Russian-built Bushehr nuclear power station which lies on the Gulf coast in southwestern Iran.
The plant will actually produce electricity from November 2007, and the nuclear fuel for the plant is to be delivered no later than March.
Ivanov, the Russian Security Council secretary, is also due to meet Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and national security chief and top nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani. He is expected to hold a press conference with his Iranian counterpart later.
Russia supports Iran’s right to peaceful nuclear technology but voted for a UN Security Council resolution in December that imposes sanctions on Tehran over its repeated refusal to freeze uranium enrichment.
RUSSIA’S THIRD LARGEST CITY MAY BE SOURCE FOR URANIUM
Russian city may be source for uranium
By Jim Heintz
The Associated Press
January 27, 2007
Novosibirsk is located in the depths of Siberia, but despite the remoteness it’s one of Russia’s main areas for nuclear activity and a cause of concern for those worried about nuclear materials falling into terrorists’ hands.
The concerns about Russia’s third-largest city rose to the forefront this week after officials in the former Soviet republic of Georgia announced the arrest of a Russian man for allegedly trying to sell weapons-grade uranium to an undercover agent.
The man, who was arrested last year, initially told his interrogators the uranium came from Novosibirsk, 1,600 miles east of Moscow, Georgian Interior Ministry spokesman Shota Utiashvili told The Associated Press on Saturday. He later recanted his statement, but Georgian authorities sent a letter to Russia’s Federal Security Service inquiring about the possible link to Novosibirsk, Utiashvili said. The agency declined to comment Saturday.
A top Russian science official has said the sample of the alleged contraband uranium provided by Georgia was too small for analysis that could determine its origin.
The episode appeared to cast doubt on Russia’s ability to halt the black-market trade in nuclear materials and renewed concern about security at Russia’s array of nuclear facilities.
The Novosibirsk Chemical Concentrates Plant is one of Russia’s main facilities for producing enriched uranium both for use in nuclear reactors and in the higher concentration that could be used to make an atomic bomb.
In addition, highly enriched uranium has been shipped into Novosibirsk in recent years from former Soviet bloc countries, including Poland and Romania. Under a program backed by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the uranium is to be blended down into lower concentrations.
The U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration funded a program to improve security at the Novosibirsk plant as part of a wider initiative to boost security at facilities throughout Russia. The NNSA says the Novosibirsk plant completed its upgrade in late 2004.
However, security apparently was lax in Novosibirsk for years before that. In 2002, the head of the agency that was then responsible for security at nuclear facilities admitted that weapons-grade nuclear material had disappeared from Russian facilities.
“Most often, these instances are connected with factories preparing fuel” including Novosibirsk’s, the official, Yuri Vishnyevsky, said at the time.
Novosibirsk was also the site of the 1997 arrest of two men who officials said intended to smuggle some 11 pounds of enriched uranium to Pakistan or China. That uranium reportedly was stolen from a plant in the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan.
Security at Russia’s nuclear facilities was seen as deteriorating rapidly in the early years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when economic hardships made black-market activities increasingly widespread and as political chaos left official lines of command and supervision shaky.
The U.S.-based organization Nuclear Threat Initiative said in a report last year that Russia remains the prime country of concern for contraband nuclear material.
“Russia has the world’s largest stockpiles of both nuclear weapons and the materials to make them, scattered among hundreds of buildings and bunkers at scores of sites. Over the past 15 years security for those stockpiles has improved from poor to moderate, but there remain immense threats those security systems must confront,” the NTI said.
RUSSIA COMPLETES DELIVERY OF MISSILES TO IRAN
Russia completes delivery of missiles to Iran
Deutsche Welle German radio
January 23, 2007
The head of Russia’s state arms exporter has said that the country has fulfilled a contract to deliver anti-aircraft missiles to Iran. The official Itar-Tass news agency quoted Sergei Chemezov, head of Rosoboronexport, as saying that they completed delivery of the TOR-M1 missiles at the end of December last year.
The United States and Israel say Iran could use the missile systems to attack its neighbours and undermine security in the Middle East. Russia says the missiles only operate over a short-range and are a purely defensive weapon.
The United Nations has banned sensitive nuclear trade with Iran but there are no sanctions on conventional weapons like the TOR-M1 systems.
TOR-M1 ANTI-AIRCRAFT MIDDILE DELIVERY TO IRAN COMPLETED
Tor-M1 anti-aircraft missile delivery to Iran completed – Exporter
RIA Novosti
January 23, 2007
Russian arms export monopoly Rosoboronexport confirmed Tuesday it has completed delivery of Tor-M1 anti-aircraft missile systems to Iran under a contract.
“The [Tor-M1] systems were delivered in late December of last year,” Rosoboronexport Director General Sergei Chemezov said.
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov first announced the completion of the delivery last week.
Russia undertook to supply 29 Tor-M1 missile systems to Iran under a $700 million contract signed at the end of 2005. The United States protested the deal, which it feared could bolster the military capabilities of the Islamic Republic, classified by Washington as a “rogue state” and part of “the axis of evil.”
Russia has insisted that the contract for the delivery of the Tor-M1 missiles to Iran was concluded in line with international law, and that the system is intended for defense purposes only.
Last December, the UN Security Council adopted a revised version of a resolution to punish Tehran for its refusal to its halt uranium enrichment, but Russia managed to uphold its economic interests and ensured the implementation of its earlier signed contracts with Iran, including on the construction of a light-water reactor in Bushehr and the delivery of the Tor-M1 and S-300 air defense systems.
The Tor-M1, developed by the Russian company Almaz-Antei, is a high-precision missile system designed to destroy aircraft, manned or unmanned, and cruise missiles flying at an altitude of up to 10 kilometers (6 miles). It was introduced at the Russian aerospace show MAKS in 2005. Each system is equipped with 8 short-range missiles, associating radars, fire control systems and a battery command post.
N. KOREA IS HELPING IRAN PREPARE AN UNDERGROUND NUCLEAR TEST
N Korea helping Iran with nuclear testing
By Con Coughlin
The Daily Telegraph (London)
January 24, 2007
North Korea is helping Iran to prepare an underground nuclear test similar to the one Pyongyang carried out last year.
Under the terms of a new understanding between the two countries, the North Koreans have agreed to share all the data and information they received from their successful test last October with Teheran’s nuclear scientists.
North Korea provoked an international outcry when it successfully fired a bomb at a secret underground location and Western intelligence officials are convinced that Iran is working on its own weapons programme.
A senior European defence official told The Daily Telegraph that North Korea had invited a team of Iranian nuclear scientists to study the results of last October’s underground test to assist Teheran’s preparations to conduct its own – possibly by the end of this year.
There were unconfirmed reports at the time of the Korean firing that an Iranian team was present. Iranian military advisers regularly visit North Korea to participate in missile tests.
Now the long-standing military co-operation between the countries has been extended to nuclear issues.
As a result, senior western military officials are deeply concerned that the North Koreans’ technical superiority will allow the Iranians to accelerate development of their own nuclear weapon.
“The Iranians are working closely with the North Koreans to study the results of last year’s North Korean nuclear bomb test,” said the European defence official.
“We have identified increased activity at all of Iran’s nuclear facilities since the turn of the year,” he said.
“All the indications are that the Iranians are working hard to prepare for their own underground nuclear test.”
The disclosure of the nuclear co-operation between North Korea and Iran comes as Teheran seems set on a collision course with the West over its nuclear programme, although it insists it is entirely peaceful.
Both countries were named in President George W Bush’s famous “axis of evil” State of the Union speech in 2002.
The United Nations Security Council has unanimously authorised the imposition of “smart” sanctions against Iran.
This is because of its refusal to suspend its uranium enrichment programme, which most Western intelligence agencies believe is part of a clandestine nuclear weapons programme.
France expressed concern yesterday over an Iranian decision to bar 38 UN nuclear inspectors from Iran, claiming that Teheran appeared to be singling out westerners from the inspection team.
Intelligence estimates vary about how long it could take Teheran to produce a nuclear warhead. But defence officials monitoring the growing co-operation between North Korea and Iran believe the Iranians could be in a position to test fire a low-grade device – less than half a kiloton – within 12 months.
The precise location of the Iranian test site is unknown, but is likely to be located in a mountainous region where it is difficult for spy satellites to pick up any unusual activity.
Teheran successfully concealed the existence of several key nuclear sites – including the controversial Natanz uranium enrichment complex – until their locations were disclosed by Iranian dissidents three years ago.
Western intelligence agencies have reported an increase in the number of North Korean and Iranian scientists travelling between the two countries.
The increased co-operation on nuclear issues began last November when a team of Iranian nuclear scientists met their North Korean counterparts to study the technical and political implications of Pyongyang’s nuclear test.
The Iranians are reported to have been encouraged by the fact that no punitive action was taken against North Korea, despite the international outcry that greeted the underground firing.
This has persuaded the Iranian regime to press ahead with its own nuclear programme with the aim of testing a low-grade device, which would be difficult for international inspectors to detect.
IRAN SIGNS DEFENSE COOPERATION AGREEMENT WITH A EUROPEAN COUNTRY
Iran, Belarus sign defense agreement
Agence France-Presse (AFP)
January 23, 2007
www.defensenews.com/story.php?F=2499718&C=mideast
Iran and its top European ally Belarus on Jan. 22 signed an agreement on defense cooperation, the semi-official Mehr news agency reported.
Iranian Defense Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najar signed the memorandum of understanding with his Belarussian counterpart Leonid Maltsev, who was on a two-day visit to Tehran.
“Exchanging expert delegations, transfer of defense experience and cooperation in technical and educational fields are included in this memorandum of understanding,” the agency said.
Maltsev also met President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the chief of the elite Revolutionary Guards, Yahya Rahim Safavi. Belarus has emerged as a prominent supporter of Iran, openly backing Iran’s contested nuclear program.
Despite fierce Western criticism, Belarus has also sold Russian-made conventional military equipment and spare parts to Iran. The deal was signed as Iran launched a round of war games to test short-range missiles amid the mounting international pressure on Tehran over its failure to suspend nuclear work.
The two countries already signed a raft of deals to massively increase bilateral trade in a November 2006 visit by Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko to Tehran.
Lukashenko’s government has been fiercely criticized by the European Union and the United States, who accuse him of running an authoritarian regime that clamps down on human rights.
* Arab paper: U.S. will strike Iran before April 2007
* And introducing the “Burkini,” the new Islamic swimsuit, complete with head covering
CONTENTS
1. Saudis may ban Letter “X”
2. Welcome to the Burkini, the new Islamic swimsuit
3. 14 Carter Center advisers resign over “apartheid” book
4. Hamas denies recognizing “Israel”
5. Foreign investment in Israel reaches record high in 2006
6. The “Red Crystal” comes into effect
7. Hizb ut-Tahrir seeks to recruit British Muslims
8. British TV documentary exposes extremism in UK mosques
9. Arab paper: U.S. will strike Iran before April 2007
10. “US military strike on Iran seen by April ’07” (Arab Times, Jan. 14, 2007)
11. “Jimmy Carter interceded on behalf of Nazi SS Guard” (INN, Jan. 17, 2007)
This dispatch contains items on a number of different subjects, and includes updates to other recent dispatches.
SAUDIS MAY BAN LETTER “X”
A group of Islamic clergy in Saudi Arabia this week condemned the letter “X” because of its supposed similarity to the banned Christian symbol, the cross.
The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, which has the ultimate say in all legal, civil and governance matters in the dictatorial kingdom, issued a fatwa, or religious edict, against the “X.”
It came in response to a Saudi Ministry of Trade query about whether a Saudi businessman could be granted trademark protection for a new service of his with the English name “Explorer.”
The request from the businessman, Amru Mohammad Faisal, was turned down.
“Experts who examined the English word ‘explorer’ were struck by how suspicious that ‘X’ appeared,” Youssef Ibrahim reports in the New York Sun.
WELCOME TO THE BURKINI, THE NEW ISLAMIC SWIMSUIT
An Australian designer has created the world’s first two-piece Islamic swimsuit, the burkini. This lightweight, head-to-ankle costume is the first to be streamlined into a two-piece suit which incorporates a head covering.
Aheda Zanetti designed the suit because “A lot of girls were missing out, a lot of women were missing out, on a lot of sporting activities, including swimming.” Australia has a strong beach culture that devout Muslims felt they were unable to participate in.
Zanetti’s company Ahiida, which is based in Sydney, has as its motto: “Modesty is number one.”
Lebanese-born Zanetti, a 39-year-old mother-of-four, says she is something of an accidental designer. Trained as a hairdresser, she has never worn a burqa, the restrictive all-encompassing gown worn by women in more conservative Muslim cultures from which her full-body swimsuits take their name. And she never wore a veil until she began designing sportswear, but does now.
14 CARTER CENTER ADVISERS RESIGN OVER “APARTHEID” BOOK
Fourteen members of an advisory group to the center of former President Jimmy Carter have resigned over concerns that Carter’s book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” does not represent “the Jimmy Carter we came to respect and support.” The fourteen members are not conservatives, but liberal allies of the former Democratic President, who believe his denigration of Israel has gone too far.
The members submitted a joint resignation letter, saying the book confuses opinion with fact. The letter said that the book “portrays the conflict between Israel and her neighbors as a purely one-sided affair with Israel holding all the responsibility for resolving the conflict.”
For more on Carter, please see the dispatch Jimmy Carter called an anti-Semite live on American TV (Dec. 6, 2006).
The final article attached below (which I recommend reading in full) highlights testimony from Neil Sher, a veteran of the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigation. In 1987 he received a letter from Carter asking him to show “special consideration” to a man proven to have murdered Jews in the Mauthausen death camp in Austria.
Sher decided to go public now about Carter’s intervention because it “always bothered him… here was Jimmy Carter jumping in on behalf of someone who did not deserve in any way, shape or form special consideration. And the things he has now said about the Jewish lobby really exposes where his heart really lies.”
Daniel Freedman has obtained from sources at the U.S. Justice Department the original copy of Carter’s handwritten note interceding on behalf of the Nazi SS Guard, scanned it, and placed it on his blog at: www.itshinesforall.com/2007/01/exclusive_note.html.
Freedman, who is a subscriber to this list, tells me he has personally seen the note and handwriting experts have verified on behalf of the New York Sun that it is indeed Carter’s handwriting.
HAMAS DENIES RECOGNIZING “ISRAEL”
The following is an official statement released by Hamas in response to widespread media reports last week, following an interview Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal gave to the ever-unreliable Reuters news agency, that Hamas may recognize Israel.
***
Hamas denies statements attributed to Hamas on the recognition of “Israel”
Translated from Arabic
January 14, 2007
An official source in the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), including the following: The Reuters News agency televised an interview with Brother Mujahid Khaled Mashaal, the leader of the political bureau of Hamas movement, on Wednesday, January 10, 2007, but the quoted statements were inaccurate and distorted on the subject of recognition of “Israel.”
And despite the fact that some satellite channels broadcast some excerpts from the statements that showed brother Mashaal, the mass media again insisted on broadcasting and publishing distorted statements. We wish to clarify that what Khalid Mashal said during the interview is that there is an entity called “Israel” that is on Palestinian territories and that it is a reality, but on the other hand, stressed that the Hamas movement’s position in this matter is neither recognition nor acknowledgement.
FOREIGN INVESTMENT IN ISRAEL REACHES RECORD HIGH IN 2006
This is an update to Israel’s economy soars ahead, while Palestinians squander millions (Jan. 12, 2007).
Foreign investment in Israel more than doubled last year, according to a new report by the Bank of Israel. Spurred on by Warren Buffet’s acquisition of Iscar Corporation, foreign investment in 2006 rose to $21.1 billion from its 2005 level of $9.9 billion. (The 2004 level was $7.2 billion.) The bank also reported that Israelis invested five times more overseas in 2006 than they did in 2005, setting a record investment of $21 billion.
THE “RED CRYSTAL” COMES INTO EFFECT
This is an update to the fifth note in the dispatch Donald Trump invests $300 million in Israel (& more Islamic gay-bashing) (July 5, 2006).
The newest symbol of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent movement – the “red crystal” – came into effect at the beginning of this week. The new emblem, which resembles a cross between a square and a diamond – was created in order to allow Israel to become a member and to permit Israeli relief workers in areas of conflict to operate safely under the protection of a recognized symbol.
Israel’s Red Star of David (Magen David Adom) has for decades struggled to join the International Red Cross. America threatened to leave the Red Cross if the discrimination against Israel continued. Israelis were particularly upset, given the infamous collaboration between some officials of the Red Cross and the Nazis during the Holocaust.
The Palestinian Red Crescent emergency service is already a member of the umbrella relief organization.
HIZB UT-TAHRIR SEEKS TO RECRUIT BRITISH MUSLIMS
This is an update to Islamic militant Hizb ut-Tahrir infiltrates Reuters (& Prince Harry apologizes) (Sept. 15, 2005).
According to the UK newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, Hizb ut-Tahrir is currently attempting to use American air strikes that killed innocent civilians as well as al-Qaeda members in southern Somalia last week, to persuade British Muslims of Somali origin to join their ranks.
The Telegraph said that the Islamic Liberation Party, which is banned by law in Germany, Russia, Pakistan and elsewhere, was distributing leaflets in London accusing the United States of practicing “state terrorism”. The leaflets included graphic images and were written in Somali.
For more, see: www.alwatanvoice.com/arabic/
BRITISH TV DOCUMENTARY EXPOSES EXTREMISM IN UK MOSQUES
Meanwhile, a British TV documentary has secretly filmed imams at a number of British mosques, inciting hatred, bigotry and intolerance. Channel Four television filmed the mosques over a 12-month period. The program “Undercover Mosques” contained sermons showing preachers proclaiming the supremacy of Islam, preaching hatred for Jews, Christians and Gays and for Muslims who do not follow their extreme beliefs.
Imams predicted imminent jihad, and called on British Muslims to “dismantle” British democracy. They must “live like a state within a state until they are strong enough to take over,” said one preacher. The investigation showed the influence in the UK of Wahhabism, an extreme Saudi Arabian interpretation of Islam.
The program also showed how Saudi universities are recruiting young Western Muslims to train in their extreme theology, and are then sent back to Europe to spread the teachings.
The program – which I would strongly recommend watching in full – can be seen in six parts on YouTube. The links are:
Part 1: www.youtube.com/watch?v=peFQWuk4nuo
Part 2: www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuCLC8kjWCI
Part 3: www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5t5EqWX92k
Part 4: www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMztM0Z7BYE
Part 5: www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4Zv3BUmwqs
Part 6: www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvjvNScmTQA
ARAB PAPER: U.S. WILL STRIKE IRAN BEFORE APRIL 2007
The first article below is a report from the Arab Times by Ahmed Al-Jarallah, its Editor-in-Chief, who claims that “Washington will launch a military strike on Iran before April 2007… The attack will be launched from the sea and Patriot missiles will guard all oil-producing countries in the region.”
According to a “reliable source” “they have chosen April as British Prime Minister Tony Blair has said it will be the last month in office for him. The United States has to take action against Iran and Syria before April 2007.”
The source added that “the US and its allies will target the oil installations and nuclear facilities of Iran ensuring there is no environmental catastrophe or after effects.”
-- Tom Gross
KUWAITI PAPER: US MILITARY TO STRIKE IRAN IN APRIL
US military strike on Iran seen by April ’07; Sea-launched attack to hit oil, N-sites
By Ahmed Al-Jarallah
The Arab Times
January 14, 2007
www.arabtimesonline.com/arabtimes/kuwait/Viewdet.asp?ID=9548&cat=a
Washington will launch a military strike on Iran before April 2007, say sources. The attack will be launched from the sea and Patriot missiles will guard all oil-producing countries in the region, the sources add. Recent statements emanating from the United States indicate the Bush administration’s new strategy for Iraq doesn’t include any proposal to make a compromise or negotiate with Syria or Iran. A reliable source said President Bush recently held a meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of State Dr Condoleezza Rice and other assistants in the White House where they discussed the plan to attack Iran in minute detail.
According to the source, Vice President Dick Cheney highlighted the threat posed by Iran to not only Saudi Arabia but the whole region. “Tehran is not playing politics. Iranian leaders are using their country’s religious influence to support the aggressive regime’s ambition to expand,” the source quoted Dick Cheney as saying. Indicating participants of the meeting agreed to impose restrictions on the ambitions of Iranian regime before April 2007 without exposing other countries in the region to any danger, the source said “they have chosen April as British Prime Minister Tony Blair has said it will be the last month in office for him. The United States has to take action against Iran and Syria before April 2007.”
Claiming the attack will be launched from the sea and not from any country in the region, he said “the US and its allies will target the oil installations and nuclear facilities of Iran ensuring there is no environmental catastrophe or after effects.” “Already the US has started sending its warships to the Gulf and the build-up will continue until Washington has the required number by the end of this month,” the source said. “US forces in Iraq and other countries in the region will be protected against any Iranian missile attack by an advanced Patriot missile system.”
He went on to say “although US Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Dr Condoleezza Rice suggested postponing the attack, President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney insisted on attacking Tehran without any negotiations based on the lesson they learnt in Iraq recently.” The Bush administration believes attacking Iran will create a new power balance in the region, calm down the situation in Iraq and pave the way for their democratic project, which had to be suspended due to the interference of Tehran and Damascus in Iraq, he continued. The attack on Iran will weaken the Syrian regime, which will eventually fade away, the source said.
“JIMMY CARTER INTERCEDED ON BEHALF OF NAZI SS GUARD”
Exclusive: Jimmy Carter interceded on behalf of Nazi SS Guard
By Ezra HaLevi
Israel National News
January 17, 2007
www.israelnationalnews.com/news.php3?id=119732
Neil Sher, a veteran of the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigation, described a letter he received from Carter in 1987 in an interview with Israel National Radio’s Tovia Singer. The letter, written and signed by Carter, asked that Sher show “special consideration” for a man proven to have murdered Jews in the Mauthausen death camp in Austria.
“In 1987, Carter had been out of office for seven years or so,” Sher recalled. “It was a very active period for my office. We had just barred Kurt Waldheim – he was then president of Austria and former head of the United Nations – from entering the U.S. because of his Nazi past and his involvement in the persecution of civilians during the war. We had just deported an Estonian Nazi Commandant back to the Soviet Union after a bruising battle after which we were attacked by Reagan White House Communications Director Patrick Buchanan.
“Also around that time, in the spring of 1987, we deported a series of SS guards from concentration camps, whose names nobody would know. One such character we sent back to Austria was a man named Martin Bartesch.”
Bartesch, who had immigrated to the U.S. and lived in Chicago, admitted to Sher’s office and the court that he had voluntarily joined the Waffen SS and had served in the notorious SS Death’s Head Division at the Mauthausen concentration camp where, at the hands of Bartesch and his cohorts, many thousands of prisoners were gassed, shot, starved and worked to death. He also confessed to having concealed his service at the infamous camp from U.S. immigration officials.
“We had an extraordinary piece of evidence against him – a book that was kept by the SS and captured by the American armed forces when they liberated Mauthausen,” Sher said. “We called it the death book. It was a roster that the Germans required them to keep that identified SS guards as they extended weapons to murder the inmates and prisoners.”
An entry in the book for October 10, 1943 registered the shooting death of Max Oschorn, a French Jewish prisoner. His murderer was also recorded: SS guard Martin Bartesch. “It was a most chilling document,” Sher recalled.
The same evidence was used by the U.S. military in postwar trials as the basis for execution or long prison sentences for many identified SS guards.
“We kicked him out and he went back to Austria. In the meantime, his family – he had adult kids – went on a campaign, also supported by his church, to try to get special treatment. In so doing they attacked the activities of our office and me personally. They claimed we used phony evidence from the Soviet Union – which was nonsense. They claimed he was a young man of only 17 or 18 when he joined the Nazi forces, asking for some sympathetic treatment and defense from our office, which they claimed was just after vengeance.”
The family approached several members of Congress. “The congressmen would, very understandably, forward their claims over to our office and when they learned the facts they would invariably drop the case,” Sher recalled.
But there was one politician who accepted the claims without asking for any further information.
“One day, in the fall of ’87, my secretary walks in and gives me a letter with a Georgia return address reading ‘Jimmy Carter.’ I assumed it was a prank from some old college buddies, but it wasn’t. It was the original copy of the letter Bartesch’s daughter sent to Carter, after Bartash had already been deported.
“In the letter, she claimed we were un-American, only after vengeance, and persecuting a man for what he did when he was only 17 and 18 years old.
“I couldn’t help thinking of my own father who returned home with shrapnel wounds after he joined the U.S. Army as a teenager to fight the Nazis and hit the beaches at Normandy at that same age on D-day.
“On the upper corner of the letter was a note signed by Jimmy Carter saying that in cases such as this, he wanted ‘special consideration for the family for humanitarian reasons.’
“I didn’t respond to the letter – the case was already over and he was out of the country – but it always stuck in my craw. A former president who didn’t do what I would expect him to do – with a full staff at his disposal – to find out the facts before he took up the side of this person. But I wasn’t going to pick a fight with a former president. We had enough on our plate.”
Now, following Carter’s book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, Sher has decided to go public with the hope that a public made aware of Carter’s support and defense of a Nazi SS man will help illustrate why the arbiter of the Camp David Accords came out with a book defending the Palestinians after the landslide election of the Islamist Hamas terror group.
“It always bothered me, but I didn’t go public with it until recently, when he wrote this book and let it spill out where his sentiments really lie,” Sher said. “Here was Jimmy Carter jumping in on behalf of someone who did not deserve in any way, shape or form special consideration. And the things he has now said about the Jewish lobby really exposes where his heart really lies.”
* Israel “cages” Palestinians into “ghettoes” and “poisons the wells,” says leading UK charity
* Adds patently false claims, such as that Israel’s “Apartheid Wall” annexes 47 percent of the West Bank
CONTENTS
1. The charity that goes to extraordinary lengths to demonize Israel
2. Patently false claims
3. Another brick in the wall
4. Anti-Semitic rhetoric
5. “War on Want Wages War on Israel” (NGO Monitor, Jan. 15, 2007)
THE CHARITY THAT GOES TO EXTRAORDINARY LENGTHS TO DEMONIZE ISRAEL
[Note by Tom Gross]
Recently I twice drew attention to the particularly harsh anti-Israel campaigns (bordering on anti-Semitism as regards their “IDF checkpoint Christmas cards”) of the well-funded British-registered charity, War on Want.
According to its charter, War on Want is supposed to campaign “against the root causes of global poverty, inequality and injustice,” not use its ample resources to repeatedly demonize the world’s only Jewish state.
Inspired by the atmosphere surrounding War on Want’s campaign, other groups in Britain and elsewhere have got in on the act. For example, in Cambridgeshire, England, the Sacred Heart Church in St. Ives, replaced its annual nativity scene with a 7.2-meter high replica of what it calls “Israel’s Apartheid Wall,” while appealing for donations to groups – which have links to Hamas – in Bethlehem.
For these previous dispatches, see:
* UK paper: Virgin Mary is a “Palestinian refugee in Bethlehem” (Dec. 26, 2006)
* So busy attacking Israel, they forgot about these beheadings (Nov. 21, 2006)
For the Christmas cards, complete with barbed wire and an Israeli rifle pointing at the church, see: www.waronwant.org/Christmas+Cards+-+Mary+and+Joseph+13386.twl
PATENTLY FALSE CLAIMS
Now the lobby group “NGO Monitor” (whose senior editors subscribe to this list) have followed up this week with a thorough report exposing War on Want’s activities. I attach it below.
According to NGO Monitor, the charity places great emphasis on its “Palestine” campaign, and despite a number of investigations by the UK Charity Commission into its political activities, it continues to misrepresent international law and promote apartheid rhetoric (while ignoring Palestinian terrorism), to justify boycotts, sanctions and divestment campaigns against Israel.
NGO Monitor reports that War on Want’s “campaign” on “Palestine” “is one of only two country-specific campaigns listed on its website.”
War on Want receives funding from a number of sources including the European Union, the UK Department for International Development, and Irish Aid.
ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL
The lengths to which this charity goes to demonize Israel are quite extraordinary, says NGO Monitor. War on Want’s website provides a downloadable petition form to send to British Prime Minister Tony Blair calling him “to state his support for sanctions against Israel now.”
They have also pursued “a sophisticated public relations campaign against the ‘apartheid wall,’ involving former Pink Floyd singer, Roger Waters… Its ‘Facts about the Wall’ page misrepresents the July 2004 International Court of Justice advisory opinion as a binding legal ‘ruling’; it describes the ‘surround[ing]’ of Qalqilya without mentioning terrorist attacks that have originated from this town; and asserts the patently false claim that ‘the Wall still annexes some 47 percent of the West Bank.’”
ANTI-SEMITIC RHETORIC
NGO Monitor also points out that “In addition to its rhetoric and political activities designed to demonize Israel, War on Want often incorporates anti-Semitic rhetoric and imagery into its campaigns. Its website frequently abuses Holocaust themes in a highly offensive manner: Israel is accused of ‘caging’ Palestinians into ‘ghettos’; engaging in an ‘expulsion project’; and acting like a ‘heavyweight beating a child.’ War on Want adopts traditional anti-Semitic libels (such as ‘poisoning the wells’) in repeating unsupported allegations that the IDF targets Palestinian water sources as a ‘punitive and discriminatory tool.’”
-- Tom Gross
FULL PIECE
“AN EXTREMELY POLITICIZED NGO”
War on Want Wages War on Israel
NGO Monitor
January 15, 2007
ngo-monitor.org/article/war_on_want_wages_war_on_israel_update_
The UK registered charity, War on Want (WoW) states that it “fights poverty in developing countries in partnership and solidarity with people affected by globalisation.” It says that “poverty is political” and campaigns “against the root causes of global poverty, inequality and injustice.” Despite a number of investigations by the UK Charity Commission for its political campaigns, WoW makes no secret of its politicization and this is evident in its one-sided approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The conflict is a primary issue for War on Want. Its “campaign” on “Palestine” is one of only two country-specific campaigns out of seven projects listed on its website. [1] The prominence and resource allocation for this campaign is likely to grow in 2007.
In a “2006: year of achievement” report, WoW states that “ [m]uch of [our] work has focused on building coalitions in the UK to make a major push for Palestine next year.” The “Palestine campaign” uses sophisticated marketing tactics, including high profile media figures, to promote the Durban Strategy of isolating Israel internationally through its identification with Apartheid South Africa.
The campaign utilizes political rhetoric to portray Israel as aggressor and Palestinians as victims, ignoring the context of terror and misrepresenting Israeli actions in response. WoW publications frequently employ terms such as “war crimes” and “collective punishment,” and consistently condemn Israel’s “campaign of apartheid,” “the apartheid nature of the West Bank,” and the “apartheid wall.”
The Separation Barrier is further described as “part of a wider political game…– annexing the best resources and land for Israel and consigning the Palestinians to… a gigantic prison.” WoW’s distorted portrayal of Israeli self-defensive measures are used to justify its leadership of the boycott and sanctions movement, including campaigns against Caterpillar and extensive lobbying of the Church of England and EU and UK government officials.
FUNDING
War on Want’s finances are not transparent and annual reports or audited accounts are not made available on the NGO’s website. It states that it receives funding from a number of different sources including the European Union (EU), the UK Department for International Development (DFID), Irish Aid (IA) and others. However, no further details are provided on WoW’s website and funding information was also unavailable via the EU and Irish Aid websites. DFID provided War on Want with £265,000 in 2005/06 through its Civil Society Challenge Fund. [2] Based on DFID reports, this money appears to have been directed towards WoW projects in Latin America and Southeast Asia. It is unclear if WoW receives additional monies from DFID to support the “Palestine campaign.”
However, as money is fungible, support by DFID for WoW contributes to its status, visibility, personnel, and financial capacity and frees up funding which can then be utilized for its highly politicized activities directed against Israel.
EU and DFID support for WoW is also highly problematic given the NGO’s activities which directly contradict both EU and UK policy goals. [3]
POLITICAL CAMPAIGNING
War on Want declares that 54 percent of its funds go to projects for poor people overseas and 27 percent is used for its political campaigns. It does not specify what percentage of its funds support projects for the impoverished specifically in the Palestinian Authority. Based on its website, however, and notwithstanding its charitable status, it appears that most of WoW’s “Palestine campaign” funding is used for promoting political activities and lobbying government officials rather than for specific development programs. [4] These highly biased political activities include:
* A 2005 briefing paper entitled “Time for Sanctions Against Israel”, “calls on the UK government to press for an immediate suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement and the trading preferences it confers on Israel.”
* War on Want’s website provides a downloadable petition form to send to UK Prime Minister Tony Blair calling him “to state his support for sanctions against Israel now,” due to Israel’s “continued violation of Palestinian human rights.”
* In 2006, War on Want initiated a major campaign entitled “Profiting from the Occupation: Corporate complicity in Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people”, advocating boycotts and divestment from corporations which sell goods made in the West Bank and the Golan Heights or which have carried out business with the Israeli government in those areas.
* Joining with other radical groups on this issue, War on Want has a dedicated campaign against Caterpillar’s sale of equipment to Israel, and calls for a boycott of all its products. It has also campaigned for the Church of England to withdraw its investments in Caterpillar and called on the Methodist Church of Great Britain to “divest from companies supporting Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine.” War on Want has also directly lobbied the large UK chain of department stores, John Lewis, to stop selling Caterpillar products.
* In July/August 2006, War on Want joined with the Palestine Solidarity Campaign to promote a letter writing campaign to UK Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett. The letter laments Israel’s “assault” and “collective punishment” of the Palestinians, but ignores the reason for the IDF operation – the Palestinian cross-border attack that resulted in the death of 2 Israeli soldiers and the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit. It demands the UK restore aid to the Palestinian Authority, but makes no mention that aid has been withheld due to Hamas’ refusal to renounce violence or recognize Israel.
* An October 2006 press release, calling on the UK to suspend its trade pact and engage in an arms embargo against Israel, accuses Israel of “targeted killings,” firing artillery shells near civilians, “settler violence,” and “intimidation and harassment of Palestinians.” The release makes no mention of on-going Palestinian rocket attacks from Gaza, continued attempted suicide bombings, or shooting attacks on Israeli civilians.
* As documented by NGO Monitor, WoW pursues a sophisticated public relations campaign against the “apartheid wall,” involving former Pink Floyd singer, Roger Waters. WoW maintains a separate website for its “no wall” campaign, which includes link to Electronic Intifada and Stopthewall.org. Its “Facts about the Wall” page misrepresents the July 2004 International Court of Justice advisory opinion as a binding legal “ruling”; it describes the “surround[ing]” of Qalqilya without mentioning terrorist attacks that have originated from this town; and asserts the patently false claim that “the Wall still annexes some 47 percent of the West Bank.”
* A further example of War on Want’s political campaigning is its promotion of a one-sided position during the 2006 Lebanon War. In July 2006, War on Want joined with Oxfam, World Vision UK, Save the Children and others in a press release and a letter to Prime Minister Tony Blair that urged a ceasefire “to help protect the civilians dying in this conflict.” War on Want did not address the issue of disarming Hezbollah, and the right of Israel to defend its civilians from deliberate rocket attacks.
* War on Want’s submission to the UK Parliamentary Committee addressing development assistance to the Palestinian Authority describes the Separation Barrier as a “land grab” intended to “make Palestinian lives more miserable” and claims the disengagement from Gaza “left all decisions of national sovereignty in the hands of the Israeli Government,” and “gave [Israel] carte blanche to re-invade at will.” It blames Palestinian poverty solely on the “Occupation” rather than on Palestinian terrorism or internal corruption. The submission erases the detailed evidence regarding the lives saved and reduction in terror resulting from the barrier.
WAR ON WANT AND ANTI-SEMITISM
In addition to its rhetoric and political activities designed to demonize Israel, War on Want often incorporates anti-Semitic rhetoric and imagery in its campaigns. Its website frequently abuses Holocaust themes in a highly offensive manner: Israel is accused of “caging” Palestinians into “ghettos”; engaging in an “expulsion project”; and acting like a “heavyweight beating a child.” War on Want adopts traditional anti-Semitic libels (such as “poisoning the wells”) in repeating unsupported allegations that the IDF targets Palestinian water sources as a “punitive and discriminatory tool”. Most recently, its 2006 Christmas card campaign echoes the anti-Semitic blood libel of deicide. One of three cards sold on WoW’s website portrays Joseph and a pregnant Mary being searched by Israeli soldiers against the Separation Barrier outside of Bethlehem. In this image, War on Want is explicitly connecting the suffering of Palestinians with that of Jesus. The card further implies that Israel is intentionally persecuting Palestinian Christians, diverting attention from the ongoing oppression of Christians under the PA.
ALLIANCES AND ACTIVITIES
War on Want has alliances with notable radical, anti-Israel activists and NGOs:
* UN Special Rapporteur and anti-Israel activist, John Dugard is featured in several places on the WoW website. Its “Time for Sanctions” webpage is introduced with a quote from Dugard, stating, “Israel’s defiance of international law poses a threat not only to the international legal order but to the international order itself.” Dugard’s activities have been documented as virulently anti-Israel and actively campaigns against the Road Map.
* War on Want’s former General Secretary, George Galloway, is an MP in the UK for the RESPECT anti-Iraq war party whose website says “Israel has been formulating and directing UK and US foreign policy.” [5]
* As reported by NGO Monitor, on July 9, 2006, War on Want held a meeting in London called “Profiting from the Occupation: A People’s Tribunal to expose the Corporations behind the Israeli Occupation of Palestine.” The keynote speakers list included Jeff Halper of ICAHD and Mustafa Barghouti, member of the Palestinian Legislative Council and board member of the Palestinian NGO, MIFTAH. The event’s political program sparked an investigation by the UK Charity Commission, as to whether WoW was abusing its legal status as a charity organization (see below).
War on Want is also connected to the independent “Stop the Wall” campaign although the nature of the relationship is ambiguous. WoW claims that “it supports the work of Stop the Wall” and has described it as a “partner organization.” The lack of transparency in WoW accounts, however, makes it impossible to determine if this is a financial partnership.
Like WoW, Stop the Wall campaigns for boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel, which it describes as an “apartheid state”. It is partnered with PENGON, a Palestinian umbrella organization whose primary political agenda is demonstrated by its continued promotion of the myths and distortions of events that took place in Jenin in April 2002.
In May 2006, Stop the Wall also lobbied the UK’s largest teachers union, NATFHE, recommending that its members boycott Israeli academics. Stop the Wall said “the NATFHE vote is an important step towards the implementation of the call for academic boycott... and shows the determination of British academics not to be complicit with or supportive of Israeli Apartheid.”
INVESTIGATIONS BY THE UK CHARITY COMMISSION
War on Want has been investigated by the UK Charity Commission on a number of occasions. In the 1980s, the Commission found that WoW’s accounts from 1985 to 1989 were “materially misstated”.
In August 2005, after another investigation, the Charity Commission warned War on Want that its political activities must demonstrate “a reasonable expectation” that they would further its “charitable purposes.”
The Charity Commission began another investigation into War on Want’s political activities in July 2006 responding specifically to a complaint about the “Profiting from the Occupation” conference. The results of the investigation have not yet been made public as of January 2007.
In response to an NGO Monitor inquiry for an update on the investigation’s progress, the Commission stated that the “issues are now being considered at a senior level … to determine what action, if any, it is appropriate for the Commission to take.” [6]
CONCLUSION
War on Want is an extremely politicized NGO which actively promotes the Durban Strategy and uses anti-Semitic themes to attack Israel. Given WoW’s extensive political campaigning and lobbying efforts, its one-sided approach to the conflict that ignores Palestinian terrorism, and the recurring investigations by the Charity Commission, funding from the EU and UK to this NGO is highly problematic.
***
Footnotes:
1. War on Want’s campaigns include “Trade Justice,” “Corporate Accountability,” “Corporations & Conflict,” “Palestine,” “Western Sahara,” “Privitisation & Poverty,” and “Youth Action Network”.
2. This fund is intended for specific projects aimed at eradicating poverty.
3. See NGO Monitor’s recent reports on EU Funding and DFID for more information on these guidelines.
4. War on Want supports a farmer’s cooperative in the Palestinian Authority called Al Zaytouna. Based on the WoW website, this appears to be its only development activity in the Palestinian Authority.
5. Galloway was General Secretary at the time when the UK Charity Commission stated that War on Want’s accounts for 1985 to 1989 were “materially misstated”. The Commission did not apportion blame to Galloway, however.
6. Correspondence between NGO Monitor and Soames Shillingford of the Charity Commission, January 10, 2006.
A VICTORY FOR ISRAEL?
[Note by Tom Gross]
The head of the Israeli armed forces, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, resigned at 12.20 a.m. last night amid ongoing inquiries into last summer’s conflict between Israel and Hizbullah. Israel’s military leadership has been severely criticized for poor planning, poor strategy and poor execution during the war.
In the words of the BBC’s main headline this morning, “Today the chief of the Israeli armed forces paid the price for failing to win the Hizbullah war. The war was a disaster for Israel.”
Many in Israel concur with this assessment, and see the conflict as resulting in a major loss for Israel’s deterrence capabilities, not to mention the grave loss of life and property.
However, Israeli Maj.-Gen. Yaakov Amidror, the former commander of the IDF’s National Defense College and the IDF Staff and Command College, takes a different view.
A report by Amidror, published yesterday (although written last year) and attached below, offers a more upbeat (from an Israeli point of view) assessment of the outcome of last summer’s war with Hizbullah.
HIZBULLAH SUFFERED MORE CASUALTIES THAN IN TWENTY YEARS
Hizbullah casualties were not less than 500 and may have reached 700 – a figure greater than all the casualties Hizbullah has suffered during the last twenty years, according to Amidror. It will, he says, take Hizbullah at least two years to rebuild its capabilities and to recruit and train new people.
“When Nasrallah himself said on August 27 that if he knew his July 12 attack would lead to this kind of war, he wouldn’t have ordered the operation, this sums up in one sentence what we can understand from this war. Israel made many mistakes. But in the end, from Hizbullah’s point of view, their whole July 12 operation was a mistake.”
The greatest achievement for Israel, claims Amidror, was that “Hizbullah leader Nasrallah said at the beginning of the war that there would be no international forces and no Lebanese army in south Lebanon. The entry of these forces is, from the Israeli point of view, the greatest success of the war.”
THE IRANIANS “WERE THE BIG LOSERS IN THIS WAR”
Amidror also argues that “From the point of view of Iran, this war was a great failure. What was the whole purpose of the $2 billion that Iran invested in Hizbullah? It was the matchbox that Iran hoped to ignite to achieve something or to prevent something with regard to Israel in the future. They used it and they achieved nothing. It cannot be used again. We know how to deal with this threat, and next time we will deal with it in a better way. We have to prepare the civil defense systems in the north and use the ground forces in other ways, but if this is the threat, it’s not a strategic threat to Israel. We can cope with it.”
He also points out that “the real mood of the Israeli people after the war… is that we are not suckers and we are not going to make the same mistake again.”
For other previous dispatches on Hizbullah and last summer’s war, see:
* “The Arabs have become wise enough to know TV victory from real victory” (Sept. 5, 2006)
* UN Resolution 1701 is “the Mideast’s Munich agreement” (Aug. 22, 2006)
* Israel’s next war has begun, the one with Iran (July 19, 2006)
Amidror’s report is below. There is a summary first for those who don’t have time to read it in full.
-- Tom Gross
* Middle East leaders understand that Israel is prepared to use military force, and that in the future we are not going to be as tolerant of attempts to act against us.
* Israel also developed a system which made Hizbullah’s long-range rocket launchers good for one use only. Within less than five minutes of launch they were destroyed by Israel’s air force, an unprecedented achievement in modern warfare.
* The determination of Israel’s government to respond and to retaliate is a very important factor in restoring deterrence. Now those around Israel understand that Israel has certain red lines, and that if these lines are crossed, Israel’s retaliation will be intentionally disproportionate. As a small country, we cannot allow ourselves the luxury of reacting proportionally.
* Nasrallah said at the beginning of the war that there would be no international forces and no Lebanese army in south Lebanon. The entry of these forces is, from the Israeli point of view, the greatest success of the war.
* What is the real mood of the Israeli people after the war? It is that we are not suckers and we are not going to make the same mistake again. We are not going to put ourselves in danger if it is not necessary. We unilaterally retreated from Lebanon and didn’t retaliate for six years, and in the end we found Hizbullah in a stronger position to fight against us. When Israel retreated from Gaza what was the result? More Kassam rockets on Sderot and Ashkelon.
Misreading the Second Lebanon War
By Maj.-Gen. (res.) Yaakov Amidror
Jerusalem Issue Brief
The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs
Vol. 6, No. 16 – January 16, 2007
WHY HIZBULLAH IS KEEPING THE CEASE-FIRE
It is not easy to judge the war in Lebanon because it was not between two states. This war was very unique because it involved a guerilla organization that is an extension of two sovereign states: Iran and Syria.
Hizbullah is still functioning and was functioning during the entire war. We have identified by name and address 440 members of Hizbullah who were killed during the war. From my experience, this figure is between half and two-thirds of the actual casualties, which were not less than 500 and may have reached 700 – a figure greater than all the casualties Hizbullah has suffered during the last twenty years. It will take Hizbullah at least two years to rebuild its capabilities and to recruit and train new people. This is why Hizbullah is keeping the cease-fire.
Hizbullah succeeded in launching 4,000 short-range Katyushas into Israel and Israel didn’t stop them. At the same time, Israel hit more than 150 rocket launchers. Almost a third of these, including most of Hizbullah’s long-range missiles, were hit in a preventive air strike during the first night. Israel also developed a system which made the long-range rocket launchers good for one use only. Within less than five minutes of launch they were destroyed by Israel’s air force, an unprecedented achievement in modern warfare.
Hizbullah also sent three armed aerial drones toward Israel with a payload of 45 kilograms of TNT. One had technical problems and fell into the sea, while the other two were destroyed by Israel’s air force. This was the surprise that Hizbullah hoped to use against Tel Aviv, but they didn’t succeed.
From a military point of view, when Israel deployed its ground forces, they fulfilled every mission according to schedule. There is not one example in which Hizbullah succeeded in stopping the IDF when it had a clear mission. One of the problems was that in some areas the mission was a bit blurred.
The fact that the war was ended before Israel got back the kidnapped soldiers is a great mistake. I believe that if Israel would have said it was not going to fulfill the cease-fire without the kidnapped soldiers being transferred to the Lebanese government, we might have achieved the return of the soldiers.
THE QUESTION OF DETERRENCE
Deterrence includes two elements: the first is the determination to use your capability and the second is to have this capability. I think it was very important that Israel made the decision to go to war and sustained the war for more than a month, despite extensive Hizbullah rocket attacks across northern Israel.
The determination of Israel’s government to respond and to retaliate is a very important factor in restoring deterrence. Now those around Israel understand that Israel has certain red lines, and that if these lines are crossed by the Syrians, the Palestinians, or the Lebanese, Israel’s retaliation will be intentionally disproportionate. As a small country, we cannot allow ourselves the luxury of reacting proportionally. Israel’s military action sent a very important message to the people around us.
Middle East leaders understand that Israel is prepared to use military force, and that in the future we are not going to be as tolerant of attempts to act against us. We understand that it was a mistake not to respond to Hizbullah for six years.
Israel is returning to its previous policy of preemptive action against its enemies when necessary. This determination by the Israeli government is very important and will be part of the new way that Israel will act and react towards any threat in the future.
We believe Hizbullah fired some 1,000 anti-tank missiles at Israeli tanks, hitting around 50 tanks and penetrating half of them. In terms of other recent wars, this was not such a great success. Israelis want to believe that our tanks are impenetrable, but such a tank does not exist in physics. While this upsets many Israelis, in terms of warfare, the new missiles were nothing to write home about, and this is before we factor in new defensive systems which have been developed in Israel. Perhaps some leaders in the Middle East will make the mistake of believing that Israel’s military forces do not have the capability to deal with such threats as anti-tank missiles and Katyushas, which would also be a factor affecting deterrence.
When Nasrallah himself said on August 27 that if he knew his July 12 attack would lead to this kind of war, he wouldn’t have ordered the operation, this sums up in one sentence what we can understand from this war. Israel made many mistakes. But in the end, from Hizbullah’s point of view, their whole July 12 operation was a mistake.
THE POLITICAL PROCESS
It was understood from the beginning of the fighting that there was a need for a political process as an extension of the military operation. Here, I think that the achievements are more than many Israelis expected. Even after the Lebanese had finally pushed out the Syrians, the international community made no moves to implement the other parts of UN Resolution 1559 that clearly said all the militias in Lebanon should be disarmed and the Lebanese government should take responsibility in south Lebanon. Hizbullah leader Nasrallah said at the beginning of the war that there would be no international forces and no Lebanese army in south Lebanon. The entry of these forces is, from the Israeli point of view, the greatest success of the war.
The international community understands that the responsibility for south Lebanon is not in the hands of the Israelis. It is in the hands of the international community and the Lebanese. With more than 50 Islamic states, Israel stands alone at the UN with America and Micronesia. But the UN presence in south Lebanon is not connected only to Israel. This is a chance for Lebanon to again be a sovereign, free country without Hizbullah’s state within a state. For the UN, this is an historic opportunity to rebuild its reputation as an organization that now has the tools to implement a UN resolution with ten thousand soldiers from Europe in south Lebanon.
Yet based on our experience, we don’t trust the United Nations. Under its umbrella, Hizbullah could do whatever it wanted and the UN stopped Israel from retaliating or preventing Hizbullah from acting against us.
This war clearly exposed the relationship between terror organizations and sovereign states in the world. Syria and Iran built up Hizbullah. The Iranians invested between one and two billion dollars in the last ten years to finance, train, and arm this organization Some 80 percent of the rockets that hit Israel came from Syria. The most advanced missiles in the Russian arsenal were sent by Syria to Hizbullah, after Israel had warned the Russians not to sell them to Syria. Hizbullah is not a guerilla organization, it is an extension of Iran and Syria.
IRAN LOST THE WAR
From the point of view of Iran, this war was a great failure. What was the whole purpose of the $2 billion that Iran invested in Hizbullah? It was the matchbox that Iran hoped to ignite to achieve something or to prevent something with regard to Israel in the future. They used it and they achieved nothing. It cannot be used again. We know how to deal with this threat, and next time we will deal with it in a better way. We have to prepare the civil defense systems in the north and use the ground forces in other ways, but if this is the threat, it’s not a strategic threat to Israel. We can cope with it.
The Iranians did not even improve their reputation in this war. What did the Iranians do to help Hizbullah, their ally and their extension in south Lebanon? What was Nasrallah saying to himself sitting in a bunker somewhere - maybe under the Iranian embassy? The Iranians were the big losers in this war.
ISRAEL INVESTIGATES THE WAR
Israel is now investigating the mistakes of the war in Lebanon. We will not let it go without an investigation. Were the mistakes at the political level – we didn’t let the military act? Was it inside the military, which was not determined enough or clear enough about the goals and the missions? The main reason to investigate the war is to understand why we did not use our potential, because we had the potential to do better.
One mission which was not fulfilled was to stop the Katyushas. Some 95 percent of the rockets were launched from an area in south Lebanon bordered by the Litani River on the west and the Nabatiya area in the east. Geography remains the name of the game. When you don’t have control on the ground in the areas which are important to defend yourself, and to prevent the other side from having its capabilities, you’re not in a good position.
THE IMPACT OF THE WAR ON THE PALESTINIANS
I expect Hizbullah to invest more energy in the Palestinian territories now that it has lost its capability to use its forces in south Lebanon. Hizbullah finances Fatah-Tanzim cells in the West Bank, especially in the northern part, in Samaria. They are also very involved in Gaza where they help Hamas very much. In the past they sent some weapons ships to Gaza.
The Iranians may also decide that perhaps they can achieve more by supporting Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and Tanzim than they can through another round by Hizbullah. We can see the beginning of this in stepped-up efforts to smuggle weapons into Gaza.
What lessons will the Palestinians draw from this war? Hamas and Islamic Jihad will try to strengthen their capabilities in all the areas that seem to be weak points for the Israeli military. For example, they will seek to smuggle in more anti-tank missiles. They also understand that our air force is a main element in our capabilities, and will seek to acquire more anti-aircraft missiles as well.
The Palestinians know that the fact that the Israelis are very bitter about the consequences of the war does not mean that we didn’t succeed. They know that this is an Israeli habit, not to be satisfied with anything. I believe that the leadership of the Palestinians will understand that Israel, after the war, is a state that is not going to give up even one square kilometer if that will harm its security.
What is the real mood of the Israeli people after the war? It is that we are not suckers and we are not going to make the same mistake again. We are not going to put ourselves in danger if it is not necessary. We unilaterally retreated from Lebanon and didn’t retaliate for six years, and in the end we found Hizbullah in a stronger position to fight against us. When Israel retreated from Gaza what was the result? More Kassam rockets on Sderot and Ashkelon. We are not going to be the suckers of the Middle East. This is the deepest understanding of most Israelis, and the Palestinians are in a better position to understand this.
There will be a huge gap between the Palestinian extremists who say, “Let’s become stronger, we will show them as Hizbullah did. We will be the next Hizbullah in Gaza,” and the deeper understanding of the leadership that Israel is not going to give up, even in minor events.
SHI’ITES AND SUNNIS
This the first time in history in which the Shi’ites are becoming a leading force in the Muslim world. Of the 1.2 billion Muslims, only 15 percent are Shi’ites and they live mainly in three countries – Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon. From the Sunni point of view, this appears as an arc from Teheran through Baghdad to Beirut. The Sunnis understand better than us what it would mean if the Shi’ites became the leading force in the Middle East, and this upsets many people in the Sunni world.
Another version of the sectarian tension may be seen with the ruling Alawites in Syria. The Alawites today comprise 10 percent of the population. The other 90 percent are Sunni. The Alawites understand that the minute the Sunnis will take control of Syria, within two months the Alawites will become only 5 percent as some will flee for their lives and others will be killed by the Sunnis. The bad blood between the Alawites and the Sunnis in Syria is worse than between the Sunnis and the Shi’ites in Iraq.
* Latest American entrepreneur to invest heavily in Israel: Bill Gates
* Mohammed Dahlan: Hamas are “a bunch of murderers and thieves”
* Abbas makes anti-Semitic comments yesterday
CONTENTS
1. Gaza preacher criticizes Hamas and is slain moments later
2. Dahlan: Hamas are “a bunch of murderers and thieves”
3. PA names youth soccer tournament in honor of Saddam
4. Pakistani newspaper: The “results are for everyone to see”
5. The Israeli economy expanded nearly five percent in 2006
6. Warren Buffett, Donald Trump and Bill Gates
7. Misery pays
8. “Arabs vs Israel” (The News, Pakistan, Jan. 9, 2006)
9. “Amid political upheaval, Israeli economy stays healthy” (NY Times, Dec. 31, 2006)
10. “Bill Gates participates in Israel govt. promotional video” (Globes, Dec. 24, 2006)
11. “What did the Palestinians do with their ‘Marshall Plan’?” (Ma’ariv, Jan. 5, 2006)
This dispatch mainly contains economic issues, with three other short items about Hamas and Fatah first.
GAZA PREACHER CRITICIZES HAMAS AND IS SLAIN MOMENTS LATER
Assailants gunned down Muslim preacher Adel Nasar, known for his anti-Hamas views, moments after he exited a mosque last Friday where he delivered a sermon criticizing the Islamic group’s role in a wave of Palestinian violence, reports the Boston Globe.
DAHLAN: HAMAS ARE “A BUNCH OF MURDERERS AND THIEVES”
The senior Palestinian Fatah figure in Gaza, Mohammed Dahlan, yesterday branded the ruling Hamas organization “a bunch of murderers and thieves.”
This is the kind of accurate language that the UN, European Union, New York Times, CNN, BBC, the Guardian, the Independent, Reuters, Associated Press, Le Monde, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Tony Blair’s wife Cherie, Rachel Corrie’s supporters, Robert Fisk, Jimmy Carter, Jeremy Bowen and many others never use about Hamas.
PA NAMES YOUTH SOCCER TOURNAMENT IN HONOR OF SADDAM
Meanwhile the first Saddam Hussein Soccer Tournament for Youth in the Palestinian Authority, has been announced in the official newspaper of the Palestinian Authority, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida (January 10, 2007 edition). It will take place in the West Bank town of Tulkarm.
In addition, Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement has announced that a double memorial stone has been erected honoring both Saddam Hussein and Yasser Arafat as “Shahids” (martyrs for Allah) together. Hussein and Arafat were close allies.
Most of the western media today completely ignore Palestinian leader Abbas’s call to arms and his anti-Semitic claim that Jews are “corrupting the world.” The comments were made in a speech by Abbas in Ramallah yesterday commemorating the 42nd anniversary of the founding of his Fatah party. Abbas called on Palestinian factions to put an end to weeks of infighting and instead “raise rifles against Israel.” He also used Koranic verses to claim Jews “are corrupting humanity on earth.”
PAKISTANI NEWSPAPER: THE “RESULTS ARE FOR EVERYONE TO SEE”
The first article attached below is written by Farrukh Saleem, a newspaper columnist, from Islamabad, Pakistan, who compares Israeli economic achievements with the performance of the Arab world.
Among the many examples he gives: “Israel spends $110 on scientific research per year per person while the same figure for the Arab world is $2. Knowledge makes Israel grow by 5.2 per cent a year while ‘rates of productivity’ (the average production of one worker) in Arab countries was negative to a large and increasing extent in oil-producing countries during the 1980s and 90s.”
He continues: “Six million Israelis buy 12 million books every year making them one of the highest consumers of books in the world. Israel has the highest number of university degrees per capita in the world; the Arab world has the lowest. Israel produces more scientific papers per capita than any other country (109 per 10,000 Israelis); the Arab world – next to nothing.”
Saleem concludes that the “results are for everyone to see: The average per capita income in Israel is $25,000 while the average income within the League of Arab States is $5,000.”
THE ISRAELI ECONOMY EXPANDED NEARLY FIVE PERCENT IN 2006
The New York Times reports that despite a “typically tumultuous year” for Israel in 2006, “It was the country’s third straight year of strong growth, with the economy expanding nearly 5 percent. The stock market has been hitting record highs; unemployment is at a 10-year low. Israel’s central bank lowered interest rates to 4.5 percent on Jan. 1, putting them well below rates in the United States, an almost unprecedented development. The Israeli shekel is trading at 4.2 to the dollar, its strongest level in five years.”
The article sees the purchase of Iscar for $4 billion dollars by Warren Buffett as indicative of the strong Israeli economy. For more on Buffett’s investment, see the first note in the dispatch Bon Appetite: Buffalo meat declared kosher (& Aliza Olmert’s art quadruples in value) (May 18, 2006).
WARREN BUFFETT, DONALD TRUMP AND BILL GATES
Alongside Buffett, Donald Trump is developing a 70-story luxury residential tower on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. As the third article attached below points out, another leading American entrepreneur investing in Israel is Bill Gates.
The Tel Aviv business daily, Globes, reports that “Bill Gates is one of a number of executives of top global companies that appear in a promotional film produced by the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor. In the film, Gates praises ‘Israel’s unique human capital’ in four languages – English, French, Chinese and Spanish.”
MISERY PAYS
In contrast, the final article attached below reports on how the Palestinians have squandered, in relation to their numbers, “more aid than that provided by the Marshall Plan after World War II. Since the Oslo agreements, the Palestinians in the territories have received $5.5 billion, or $1,300 per person. By comparison, in the Marshall plan, each European enjoyed only $273 (in today’s numbers).”
The article, written by Ben-Dror Yemini, the op-ed editor of the Israeli daily Ma’ariv (and a longtime subscriber to this email list), points out that “the Palestinians have bought themselves a place of honor on the list of unfortunates in the world. A well-oiled public relations campaign has turned them into a nation of victims. Misery pays.”
The Palestinians have wasted a number of opportunities, “to achieve independence and prosperity were rejected for the ultimate goal: the removal of Israel from the map.”
I attach four articles below.
-- Tom Gross
“IF GOD WERE TO HUMILIATE A HUMAN BEING HE WOULD DENY HIM KNOWLEDGE”
Arabs vs Israel
By Farrukh Saleem
The News, Pakistan
January 9, 2006
www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=35880
Imam Ali Ibn Abi Taleb: “If God were to humiliate a human being He would deny him knowledge”
The League of Arab States has 22 members. Of the 22, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Kuwait, UAE, Bahrain, Qatar and Oman are ‘traditional monarchies’. Of the 22, Libya, Syria, Sudan, Tunisia, Algeria and Somalia are ‘Authoritarian Regimes’ (Source: www.freedomhouse.org). Of the 22, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Morocco and Somalia are among the ‘world’s most repressive regimes’ (Source: A special report to the 59th session of the UN Commission on Human Rights). Of the 330 million Muslim men, women and children living under Arab rulers a mere 486,530 live in a democracy (0.15 per cent of the total).
A mere two hundred and fifty miles from the ‘League of Dictators’ HQ in Cairo is the only ‘parliamentary democracy’ in the region; universal suffrage, multi-party, multi-candidate, competitive elections. Israel’s 6,352,117 residents are 76 per cent Jewish and 23 per cent non-Jewish (mostly Arab).
Israel spends $110 on scientific research per year per person while the same figure for the Arab world is $2. Knowledge makes Israel grow by 5.2 per cent a year while “rates of productivity (the average production of one worker) in Arab countries were negative to a large and increasing extent in oil-producing countries during the 1980s and 90s (World Bank; Arab Development Report).”
Facts cannot be denied: The state of Israel now has six universities ranked as among the best on the face of the planet. Hebrew University Jerusalem is in the top-100. Technion Israel Institute of Technology, Tel Aviv University and Weizmann Institute of Science are in the top-200. Bar Ilan University and Ben Gurion University are in the top-300. The Arab League does not have a single university in the top-400 (http:// ed.sjtu.edu.cn/ranking.htm). One in two Arab women can neither read nor write (remember, “If God were to humiliate a human being He would deny him/her knowledge”).
Israel’s universities are producing knowledge. Israeli society is applying that knowledge plus diffusing knowledge produced by others. On the other hand, within the Arab League, repressive regimes have erected religious, social and cultural barriers to the production as well as diffusion of knowledge.
Look at how knowledge is abandoning the Arab world: Between 1998 and 2000 more than 15,000 Arab physicians migrated. According to the World Bank, “roughly 25 per cent of 300,000 first degree graduates from Arab universities emigrated. Roughly 23 per cent of Arab engineers, 50 per cent of Arab doctors and 15 per cent of Arab BSc holders had emigrated.”
Israel, on the other hand, has more engineers and scientists per capita than any other country (for every 10,000 Israelis there are 145 engineers or scientists). Israel ranks among the top-7 countries worldwide for patents per capita.
Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd., Israel’s pharmaceutical giant, is the world’s largest producer of antibiotics (Teva developed Copaxone, a unique immunomodulator therapy for the treatment of multiple sclerosis, the only non-interferon agent available).
Facts are hard to deny: Most members of the Arab League grant Muslim women fewer rights – with regards to marriage, divorce, dress code, civil rights, legal status and education. Israel does not. Spain translates more books in a year than has the Arab world in the past thousand years (since the reign of Caliph Mamoun; Abbasid, caliph 813-833).
Six million Israelis buy 12 million books every year making them one of the highest consumers of books in the world. Israel has the highest number of university degrees per capita in the world; the Arab world has the lowest. Israel produces more scientific papers per capita than any other country (109 per 10,000 Israelis); the Arab world – next to nothing.
Results are for everyone to see: The average per capita income in Israel is $25,000 while the average income within the League of Arab States is $5,000.
2006 WAS ISRAEL’S THIRD STRAIGHT YEAR OF STRONG GROWTH
Amid political upheaval, Israeli economy stays healthy
By Greg Myre
The New York Times
December 31, 2006
For Israel, it has been a typically tumultuous year: Ariel Sharon, then the prime minister, collapsed into a coma on Jan. 4, the radical Islamic group Hamas won Palestinian elections later that month, and Israel fought a month long war in Lebanon this summer.
It was the country’s third straight year of strong growth, with the economy expanding nearly 5 percent. The stock market has been hitting record highs; unemployment is at a 10-year low. Israel’s central bank is lowering interest rates to 4.5 percent on Jan. 1, putting them well below rates in the United States, an almost unprecedented development. The Israeli shekel is trading at 4.2 to the dollar, its strongest level in five years.
Further, Warren E. Buffett, the billionaire investor, paid $4 billion for an Israeli company, and Donald Trump is developing a 70-story luxury residential tower on the outskirts of Tel Aviv.
“Israelis look at the economy, and they’ve essentially been through these disturbances in the past, and they know the economy is pretty robust and it tends to come back,” said Stanley Fischer, the governor of the Bank of Israel. “Things that happen here have a smaller impact on markets than I think they would abroad.”
While the Israeli economy has been thriving, the Palestinian economy has moved in the opposite direction, contracting by an estimated 10 to 15 percent this year, according to the Palestine Monetary Authority.
For Israel, the business that best illustrates the economy’s resilience this year is the company Mr. Buffett bought, Iscar Metalworking Company, a global leader in the manufacture of precision metal-cutting tools.
In May, Mr. Buffet bought 80 percent of the company, which has its headquarters on an isolated hilltop in northern Israel that offers a panoramic view of the nearby border with Lebanon.
Barely two months later, a cross-border raid by Hezbollah guerrillas ignited 34 days of fighting that pushed Israeli troops into Lebanon and drew heavy rocket barrages against northern Israel.
One rocket slammed into the Tefen Industrial Park, where Iscar is situated, causing minor damage to a building belonging to another company. Many more rockets crashed nearby during the weeks of war.
Many Iscar workers moved their families away from the border region, but the company maintained production, with only occasional slowdowns.
“It took us a brief time to adjust, but we didn’t miss a single shipment,” said Eitan Wertheimer, Iscar’s chairman. “For our customers around the world, there was no war.”
The northern city of Haifa came under almost daily rocket attacks, and ships stopped entering Haifa’s port, the country’s largest. Some exporters shipped their goods by air at much higher expense in order to meet deadlines.
The Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, which has been setting records throughout the year, seemingly shrugged off the war; it was slightly higher at the end of the conflict in August than before it started in July.
At the beginning of the year, Israel’s economy was forecast to grow at around 5.5 percent, and will come in at about 4.8 percent, according to Mr. Fischer, who attributed the dip to the war.
The Palestinian economy, meanwhile, has been devastated. During the peace talks of the 1990s, the Israelis and Palestinians increased cooperation, and by 2000, both sides were growing rapidly and nearly 150,000 Palestinians entered Israel daily. Most were workers who accounted for a large slice of the Palestinian economy.
When the Palestinian uprising began in September of that year, both sides took an immediate economic hit, but for the Palestinians, the downward spiral has yet to end.
Israeli security forces greatly increased the web of restrictions in the Palestinian areas to prevent attacks, and the measures have also imposed great hardships on Palestinian economic life. The Palestinians grew increasingly dependent on aid as their access to Israel’s economy dwindled. The problems worsened into crisis this year after Hamas came to power, and Israel began withholding Palestinian tax revenues and Western countries cut off direct aid to the Palestinian government.
The Palestinian per capita gross domestic product, which was about $1,800 annually at the beginning of the uprising, plummeted to $1,200 last year and continues to fall.
For Israelis, per capita gross domestic product has risen over the last six years from a little over $15,000 a year to around $18,000, according to government figures.
Israel turned the corner on a two-year recession in 2003, and for the past three years the economy has expanded at 4.4 percent to 5.2 percent annually, with a similar forecast for next year. The growth comes from technology, service and other modern industries, and trade mostly with the United States, Europe and East Asia.
Plagued by hyperinflation in the 1980s, Israel has an inflation rate hovering around zero percent this year, and it has been averaging less than 1 percent annually for the past five years.
The economic tide is not lifting every Israeli boat, however. Despite the economic growth, the number of Israelis living below the poverty level has been edging up, from 18 percent in 2002 to more than 20 percent last year, according to the government’s National Insurance Institute.
Critics say this is because Israelis who are struggling economically have seen their benefits fall sharply, while they remain unemployed. The unemployment rate is at its lowest level in a decade, but still relatively high at 8.4 percent.
Benjamin Netanyahu, who as finance minister pushed aggressive open-market policies from 2003 to 2005, was also widely criticized for cutting social programs in a country where couples often have many children and depend heavily on such subsidies.
“The basic problem is that economic growth has been very uneven,” said Shlomo Swirski, the academic director of Adva, a research institute that focuses on the poor.
Job growth, he said, has been concentrated in sectors that require a high level of education. Economic growth has been greatest in Tel Aviv and surrounding areas, the economic hub of the country, while the less developed Galilee in the north and Negev Desert in the south have seen much less progress, Mr. Swirski added.
“We’re looking at growth that is highly concentrated geographically, economically and socially,” he said.
Economists note that many of the poor come from two groups, Israeli Arabs and ultra-Orthodox Jews, that have large families and low participation rates in the work force. Among Israeli Arabs, few women have formal jobs. Among the ultra-Orthodox, many men do not work.
“We still see a strong debate over income distribution,” said David Levhari, an economics professor at Hebrew University. “But overall, I think we’re looking at an economy that should continue to do pretty well.”
BILL GATES PRAISES “ISRAEL’S UNIQUE HUMAN CAPITAL”
Bill Gates participates in Israel government promotional video
Also taking part in the video are representatives from Intel, Oracle, and HP.
By Hadas Manor
Globes
December 24, 2006
Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates is one of a number of executives of top global companies that appear in a promotional film produced by the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor. In the film, Gates praises “Israel’s unique human capital” in four languages – English, French, Chinese and Spanish.
The Ministry has pinned considerable hopes on the promotional film, which it is distributing to the country’s commercial attaches across the globe. Also taking part in the video are senior executives from Intel, Oracle, and HP, Cisco, General Electric and other companies, who talk about their success of their investments in Israel.
SQUANDERED MILLIONS
What did the Palestinians do with their “Marshall Plan”?
By Ben-Dror Yemini
Ma’ariv (Hebrew)
January 5, 2006
The Palestinians have bought themselves a place of honor on the list of unfortunates in the world. A well-oiled public relations campaign has turned them into a nation of victims. Misery pays. One of the countries hated by the Palestinians the most, the United States, has since 1993 helped them more than any other nation in the world, according to World Bank figures. From 1994 to 2004, the U.S. provided the Palestinians with $1.3 billion, the EU $1.1 billion, and Japan $530 million. In addition to direct aid, the U.S. is also the largest contributor to UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.
In 1992, the Palestinian per capita GDP was $2,683 per person. If there had not been terror, the Palestinian economy could have grown during the 1990s into one of the leaders in the Middle East. The money was used for three major purposes: perpetuation of the refugees as victims, purchase of weapons and explosives, and corruption. Opportunities to achieve independence and prosperity were rejected for the ultimate goal: the removal of Israel from the map.
In relation to their numbers, the Palestinians have received more aid than provided by the Marshall Plan after World War II. Since the Oslo agreements, the Palestinians in the territories have received $5.5 billion, or $1,300 per person. By comparison, in the Marshall plan, each European enjoyed only $273 (in today’s numbers). Above all, the guilt lies with those who gave these huge sums without having the Palestinians undergo a period of recovery from their futile dreams of the destruction of Israel. The result is, primarily, the continued destruction of Palestinian society.
* More Jews opt to serve in the German military
* Ancient latrine fuels debate at Qumran
* Israeli security system proves a dog’s bark can be worse than its bite
CONTENTS
1. Israel appoints its first Arab cabinet minister
2. “Germans have to go to the army. So should we”
3. The climate in England is worse for Jews
4. Ze’ev Avni, a Soviet spy in the Mossad
5. “Doguard”
6. An important toilet by the Dead Sea
7. House prices force Roman Jews out of the Ghetto
8. “More Jews opt to serve in German military” (Deutsche Welle, Jan. 8, 2007)
9. “Jews far more likely to be victims of faith hatred than Muslims” (S. Telegraph, Dec. 17, 2006)
10. “Mossad-KGB double agent Ze’ev Avni dies at age 86” (Ha’aretz, Jan. 7, 2006)
11. “From yap to growl, Israeli device dogs intruders” (Reuters, Jan. 2, 2007)
12. “Ancient latrine fuels debate at Qumran” (AP, Jan. 2, 2007)
13. “Real estate boom uprooting Jews in Roman Ghetto” (AP, Dec. 30, 2006)
This dispatch contains a variety of human interest stories.
ISRAEL APPOINTS ITS FIRST ARAB CABINET MINISTER
Ghaleb Majadleh yesterday became Israel’s first Arab and Muslim minister, taking the position of Science, Culture and Sport Minister.
The decision to appoint Majadleh was made by Labor Party Chairman Amir Peretz who called the move a historic step. (The Labor Party is the second biggest party in the ruling coalition government in Israel and is entitled to a number of cabinet seats. Majadleh replaces leftist Labor Knesset member Ophir-Paz-Pines who resigned from the cabinet recently saying he believed it was now too right-wing.)
Majadleh, a former Histadrut official who lives in Baka al-Gharbiya, described his appointment as “an important precedent-setting step toward integrating the million Arabs in this country.”
Previously, Israel had a Druze minister, Salah Tarif, who served as a minister-without-portfolio in the Likud-led government of former prime minister Ariel Sharon and the deputy foreign minister, Nawaf Masalha, was also Arab.
MK Nadia Hilu, who is an Arab Christian, was asked to replace Majadleh as the head of the Knesset’s interior committee.
“GERMANS HAVE TO GO TO THE ARMY. SO SHOULD WE”
Despite the fact that German Jews are exempt from serving in the German military, an increasing number, estimated at 200, are opting to do so, according to a report this week in Deutsche Welle. After the Holocaust, the Central Council of Jews in Germany and the German defense ministry made a deal that exempted Jews up to the third generation of Holocaust victims, from serving in the military.
However, more and more Jews feel it is a matter of duty. Norbert Kagarlitzkij, interviewed in the first article below, says “It is just part of the deal of being a young German… Germans have to go to the army for a while or do alternative community service. So should we.”
One of the German journalists who subscribes to this email list casts doubt on the “200 Jews in the German military” figure cited by Deutsche Welle, and tells me he believes the figure is considerably lower.
The modern German army, established in 1955, now has 250,000 members in total. Before the Nazis, many Jews served in the German army. More than 200,000 Jews now live in Germany. Most of them are recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union.
THE CLIMATE IN ENGLAND IS WORSE FOR JEWS
Jews in England and Wales are perhaps not as comfortable as those today in Germany. According to new British police figures, in the UK Jews are four times more likely to be the victims of racially or religious-based verbal and physical assaults than Muslims. (More details in the article from The Sunday Telegraph below.)
The BBC and other prominent British media have wrongly suggested that Muslims are the most likely victims of racial attacks in the UK, when in fact Jewish people and people of African or West Indian origin are far more likely to be the victims of such attacks.
ZE’EV AVNI, A SOVIET SPY IN THE MOSSAD
Ze’ev Avni, a notorious Mossad agent who also served as a long-term Soviet mole, has died at the age of 86. When Avni was exposed in 1956 he was tried in secret and sentenced to 14 years’ imprisonment.
The affair was a closely guarded secret, and leaked to the media only at the beginning of the 1990s. Avni is the only documented case of a Soviet spy to penetrate the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service.
Avni was born Wolf Goldstein in 1921, in Riga, Latvia. In 1942, he was recruited to Soviet intelligence by a Czech refugee named Karl Vibrel. In 1948, Avni immigrated to Israel and two years later joined the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem. Over the years he sent his Soviet operators important material about the Israeli Foreign Ministry, weapons sales to Israel and secret codes. (For more, see the article below by Yossi Melman, who is Ha’aretz’s expert on intelligence matters, and is also a longtime subscriber to this email list.)
“DOGUARD”
An Israeli firm has designed a security system that interprets a dog’s bark to sense an intruder or an attempted security breach. Bio-Sense Technologies, based in the Israeli town of Petah Tikva, has analyzed 350 barks and found dogs of all breeds and sizes barked the same alarm when they sensed a threat.
Dubbed “Doguard,” the Dog Bio Security system is in place in high-security Eshel Prison as well as Israeli military bases, water installations, farms, ranches, garages and in Jewish settlements in the West Bank. (For more, see the article below by Reuters.)
AN IMPORTANT TOILET BY THE DEAD SEA
Three researchers (an Israeli anthropologist, an American textual scholar and a French paleo-parasitologist) have found a 2,000 year-old toilet used by the ancient residents of Qumran, on the barren banks of the Dead Sea. They suspect that this is proof that people living there two millennia ago were Essenes, an ascetic Jewish sect that left Jerusalem to seek proximity to God in the desert.
It is widely thought that the ancient Essene community was home to the authors of many of the Dead Sea Scrolls. (For more, see the article below from the Associated Press.)
HOUSE PRICES FORCE ROMAN JEWS OUT OF THE GHETTO
The Jewish ghetto in Rome is witnessing a real estate boom that has led to the exit of many Jews. In the last decade property values have tripled or quadrupled, making the ghetto as expensive as other parts of downtown Rome.
According to the archive of the Rome Jewish community, fewer than 800 Jews still live in the ancient ghetto. After World War II, the area housed 6,000 Jews.
Jews have lived in Rome since the second century B.C. The city’s Jews were first confined to the ghetto, then a flood-prone slum on the banks of the Tiber River, in 1555, under the order of Pope Paul IV. Despite the changing population, the ghetto remains the center of Jewish community life in the Italian capital.
I attach six articles below, including one on the Rome ghetto.
-- Tom Gross
AN ESTIMATED 200 JEWS SERVE IN THE BUNDESWEHR
More Jews opt to serve in German military
An estimated 200 Jews serve in the Bundeswehr
Deutsche Welle
January 8, 2007
www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,2299443,00.html
Even though Jews have been mostly exempted from serving in the German military for historical reasons, an increasing number are opting to do so.
There are no rabbis in the German military and kosher food is never served. But that doesn’t matter to recent young recruits such as Norbert Kagarlitzkij who said he is pretty relaxed about being Jewish – and about serving in the German army.
“It is just part of the deal of being a young German,” he said. “Germans have to go to the army for a while or do alternative community service. So should we.”
More than 60 years after the Holocaust, it still comes as a surprise to many to hear that German Jews serve in the German armed forces, the Bundeswehr. After the war, the Central Council of Jews in Germany and the defense ministry made a deal that exempted Jews up to the third generation of Holocaust victims, from serving in the military. But these days, there are an estimated 200 Jews serving in the 250,000-strong German military. And many say that number is growing.
A matter of duty
Before the Nazis, many Jews had served in the German army – in World War I, for example. The Bundeswehr was founded in 1955. For decades afterward, most Jewish Germans would not have dreamed of serving in the military.
Michael Fürst was one of the first to do so even though two of his grandparents were killed by the Nazis. He said he felt it was his duty and should be seen as something normal.
“In 1966, in Jewish circles, the Bundeswehr was not viewed as a new army but as the heir and successor of the army that took part in killing the Jews,” he said. “I didn’t have to join the Bundeswehr. I could have requested an exemption which was always granted to people whose families had been persecuted by the Nazi regime.”
The so-called normality
More than 200,000 Jews now live in Germany. Most of them are recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Many of these immigrants, in particular, seem to have fewer qualms about serving in the German army as do the third and fourth generation of German Jews.
“There is a lot of talk about so-called normality,” said Stephan Kramer, secretary-general of the Central Council of Jews in Germany. “That we are talking about this subject is a sign of it. In fact, many young men and women in the Jewish community, especially among immigrant families, seriously consider careers in the armed forces. Obviously, the rules and regulations have to change with the times.”
Putting one’s foot in it
Most Jews that join the German army say they haven’t had a hard time fitting in, either.
“They are curious about what it’s like to be a Jew,” Kagarlizkij said of his non-Jewish counterparts. “Most of the people I have met in the Bundeswehr had never had anything to do with Jews.”
Rabbi Walter Homolka, an army reserve officer who advises the armed forces, said that the Germany military is almost too afraid of offending Jews.
“One source of tension is that the Bundeswehr is too worried about doing something wrong,” Homolka said. “Our task, as Jews, is to point out to the army where it should be careful. But the level of concern needs to be lowered... the constant fear of putting one’s foot in it.”
A democratic army
Students at Berlin’s liberal rabbinical seminary, founded in 1999, have to do a brief internship with a military. Most go to the US Army, but some now choose the Bundeswehr and say they are pleased with their choice.
“It is a democratic army, an army that is very concerned about its image, about what it does, and what it is,” said Konstantin Pal, who spent a month with the German Navy.
He added that few institutions provide such a good opportunity for anyone seeking integration into German society.
“In the Bundeswehr, the most important thing is camaraderie – not whether you go to church every Sunday or to the synagogue on Friday evening,” he said. “What counts is doing your job well.”
Last November, an association of Jewish soldiers was founded. Its aim is to honor the Jews who fell in the World War I fighting for Germany – and to provide a forum for present-day German Jewish soldiers.
“It is something new,” said Kramer of the Central Council of Jews. “We welcome the establishment of such an organization in principle – but of course it should not mean that a Jewish group within the Bundeswehr expects any special privileges.”
“MANY PEOPLE HOPED AND BELIEVED ANTI-SEMITISM HAD BURNT ITSELF OUT. THIS IS NOT THE CASE.”
Jews far more likely to be victims of faith hatred than Muslims
By Tom Harper and Ben Leapman
The Sunday Telegraph
December 17, 2006
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/12/17/nislam117.xml
Jewish people are four times more likely to be attacked because of their religion than Muslims, according to figures compiled by the police.
One in 400 Jews compared to one in 1,700 Muslims are likely to be victims of “faith hate” attacks every year. The figure is based on data collected over three months in police areas accounting for half the Muslim and Jewish populations of England and Wales. The crimes range from assault and verbal abuse to criminal damage at places of worship.
Police forces started recording the religion of faith-hate crime victims only this year. They did so on the instruction of the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), which wanted a clear picture of alleged community tensions around the country, following reports of Muslims being attacked after September 11 and the July 7 London bombings last year.
However, the first findings, for July to September, obtained by The Sunday Telegraph under freedom of information legislation, show that it is Jews who are much more likely to be targeted because of their religion.
The figures also suggest that many faith-hate crimes remain unsolved, contrary to the picture painted by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) in a report this month. The CPS said only 43 people were charged with “religiously aggravated” offences last year, and concluded that the large rise expected after the July 7 bombings had not materialised.
Police figures suggest, however, that hundreds of faith-hate crimes are being committed, with very few ever reaching court. Those figures include any crime that is reported to police which the victim believes is motivated by hatred of his or her religion.
The CPS report revealed that not a single person accused of an anti-Semitic crime had been prosecuted on a charge of religiously aggravated offending. It said: “The police statistics include incidents where no defendant has been identified or where there is insufficient evidence for a prosecution.”
A report by MPs in September said British Jews were more vulnerable to attack and abuse now than for a generation. Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader, who sat on the All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Anti-Semitism, said it was “perverse” that not all police forces recorded anti-Semitic incidents and said that some forces “verge on the complacent”. The Acpo directive was ignored by most forces, whose systems are not designed to record religion, though they routinely record ethnicity. Acpo said large organisations take time to adjust to new systems.
The Sunday Telegraph has obtained information on faith-hate crimes from the Metropolitan Police, Greater Manchester, South Wales and West Mercia forces. In London and Manchester, where Muslims outnumber Jews by four to one, anti-Semitic offences exceeded anti-Muslim offences (see table). The figures do not record the faith of the offenders.
Rabbi Alex Chapper, 33, was the victim of a “faith-hate” crime in July last year. He was returning from a synagogue in Ilford, Essex, with three Jewish friends after conducting a service. All were wearing skull caps. Seven Asian teenagers followed them down the road shouting “Yehudi”, which means Jew in Arabic. One of them shouted, “We are Pakistani, you are Jewish. We are going to kill you”, before punching Rabbi Chapper in the face and hitting one of his friends over the head with a bottle.
“It was very frightening, we were all very shaken,” said the rabbi. “I thought we were going to get seriously hurt but someone threatened to call the police and they ran off.
“We identified the youths and told the police but they were never prosecuted. They just did not seem interested. I feel very let down.”
A spokesman for the Community Security Trust, which monitors attacks on Jews, said: “Many people hoped and believed anti-Semitism had burnt itself out. This is not the case.”
THE ONLY DOCUMENTED SOVIET SPY TO PENETRATE THE MOSSAD
Mossad-KGB double agent Zeev Avni dies at age 86
By Yossi Melman
Ha’aretz
January 7, 2006
Zeev Avni, who was involved in one of Israel’s most secret espionage affairs, died last week at age 86.
Avni, a Mossad agent, was arrested in April 1956 on suspicion of being a KGB agent. It emerged that while he was cultivating former Nazis employed as military advisers by Egypt’s army for the Mossad, he was also serving as a long-term Soviet mole.
When Avni’s double life was eventually exposed, he was tried in secret and sentenced to 14 years’ imprisonment.
Avni was born Wolf Goldstein in 1921, in Riga, Latvia, to social activist parents who migrated to Germany and later to Switzerland. In 1942, after serving in the Swiss army, he was recruited to Soviet intelligence by a Czech refugee named Karl Vibrel. In 1948, Avni immigrated to Israel and settled on Kibbutz Hazorea.
Two years later Avni joined the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem, and in 1952 he was sent on a diplomatic mission to the Israeli embassy in Brussels. He contacted Vibrel in Moscow and resumed working for Soviet intelligence.
Goldstein changed his name to the Hebrew Zeev Avni, and began sending his Soviet operators important material about the Foreign Ministry, weapons sales to Israel and secret codes.
While in Brussels, Avni served as a courier and recruiter for the Paris branch of the Mossad. His relations with both the Mossad and his Soviet operators continued after he was assigned to Israel’s diplomatic mission in Belgrade, Yugoslavia.
In April 1956 he returned to Israel and asked Mossad chief Issar Harel for work. Harel became suspicious, and Avni was arrested and interrogated by the Shin Bet.
After his confession, his interrogators hoped to turn him into a double agent, but he refused and started serving his 14-year sentence.
The affair was a closely guarded secret, and leaked to the media only at the beginning of the 1990s.
Avni’s belief in communism cracked only when he learned that Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev had denounced Stalin’s crimes. At that point he began cooperating with the Mossad. He was released in 1965.
Avni is the only documented Soviet spy who penetrated the Israeli secret intelligence service. After his release, he worked as a clinical psychologist. The military censor permitted him to publish some of his memoirs in 1993.
ISRAELI SECURITY SYSTEM PROVES A DOG’S BARK CAN BE WORSE THAN ITS BITE
From yap to growl, Israeli device dogs intruders
By Corinne Heller
Reuters
January 2, 2007
An Israeli firm has designed a security system to ensure jailbreakers or intruders find a guard dog’s bark can indeed be worse than its bite.
Harnessing technology that interprets barking – to see if an animal is responding to a threat instead of just routinely woofing – the company aims to replace or supplement expensive electronic surveillance systems.
“There is currently very little utilization of the watchdog’s early warning capabilities,” says privately owned manufacturer Bio-Sense Technologies, based in the Israeli town of Petah Tikva, on its Web site.
The company – which says dogs have better night vision than humans and a vastly superior sense of smell and hearing – used computers to analyze 350 barks and found dogs of all breeds and sizes barked the same alarm when they sensed a threat.
If the dogs sense an intruder or attempted security breach, dozens of sensors around the facility pick up their “alarm bark” and alert the human operators in the control room.
Dubbed “Doguard,” the Dog Bio Security system is in place in high-security Eshel Prison as well as Israeli military bases, water installations, farms, ranches, garages and in Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.
Eshel Prison installed the system last year to supplement its existing network of electric fences and human guards, prison officer Bazov Moris told Reuters.
Now Rex, a brown American Staffordshire Terrier, Emmy, a white Caanan, and 27 other dogs guarding the prison are tracked by sensors to alert guards to any attempted breakout at the jail, which houses about 3,000 prisoners including Israelis and Palestinians.
There have been no escape attempts since the system was installed, but Moris is convinced it works. He said prisoners at other facilities had been able to escape “because dogs barked but no alert was sent to the guards.”
During a demonstration an alarm wailed as Rex and Emmy raced, growling and snarling, alongside one of the facility’s metal fences, which a man in a brown uniform was trying to scale from the other side.
Officers in a small basement office nearby watched on a surveillance video and spoke into their walkie-talkies as a wall of computer screens flashed in red: “Dog alarm in Sector 12.”
Seconds later, several prison guards, wielding clubs, raced to the scene and tackled the man to the ground.
NOT FOOLPROOF
The dog bark-reader is just one of a batch of innovative security systems to emerge from Israel, which business magazine Forbes said in December had emerged as “the go-to country for anti-terrorism technologies.”
By monitoring not just the dogs’ barks, but also their physiological responses – like heart rates – it joins a trend for computer systems building on animal knowledge that humans also share.
Another Israeli example, from Suspect Detection Systems, offers border checkpoints a computer quiz that alerts guards if travelers show a marked physiological response to particularly tough questions.
However, Doguard is not foolproof. When first set up at Eshel Prison and at a water installation and farm in central Israel, the dogs triggered several false alarms, officials said.
“The dogs need two to three weeks to adapt – they must get to know their territory,” said Daniel Low, chief executive officer of Meniv Rishon, the municipal water system of the Israeli town of Rishon Lezion.
Low said he had installed the system in several places to replace guards.
Galia Alon, an official at Modi’in Ezrahi, a large Israeli security company that supplies private guards and equipment, cautioned against relying on dogs as a first line of defense.
“Dogs are excellent at spotting intruders – they are well trained and have a more sharpened sense of smell than humans,” she said. “But people can identify people by looking at them and talking to them, and they are more inclined to catch them.”
Yossi Brami, manager of a dairy at Kibbutz Gezer, a communal farm, had the system installed two months ago. He said he was told dogs work better in pairs because one signals to the other if an intruder appears, so two were placed to guard his calves.
The dogs used in the alarm system were rescued from shelters, Bio-Sense chief executive officer Eyal Zehavi said, adding some clients asked for them to be trained professionally first.
Eshel Prison’s dogs live in individual kennels. Several times a day, they are let out to patrol buildings, where they are unleashed in a fenced-in compound.
At Kibbutz Gezer, dogs Chief and Lola are kept on a long chain and are released to run around the farm several times a day. The dogs guarding Meniv Rishon are also chained.
Israeli animal rights societies said they knew little about the system but it was preferable for dogs to live indoors and unleashed.
RESEARCHERS FIND A 2,000 YEAR-OLD TOILET ON THE BANKS OF THE DEAD SEA
Ancient latrine fuels debate at Qumran
The Associated Press
January 2, 2007
Researchers say their discovery of a 2,000-year-old toilet at one of the world’s most important archaeological sites sheds new light on whether the ancient Essene community was home to the authors of many of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
In a new study, three researchers say they have discovered the outdoor latrine used by the ancient residents of Qumran, on the barren banks of the Dead Sea. They say the find proves the people living here two millennia ago were Essenes, an ascetic Jewish sect that left Jerusalem to seek proximity to God in the desert.
Qumran and its environs have already yielded many treasures: the remains of a settlement with an aqueduct and ritual baths, ancient sandals and pottery, and the Dead Sea Scrolls – perhaps the greatest archaeological find of the 20th century.
The scrolls, which include fragments of the books of the Old Testament and treatises on communal living and apocalyptic war, have shed important light on Judaism and the origins of Christianity.
Thanks to an Israeli anthropologist, an American textual scholar and a French paleo-parasitologist, researchers can now add another find: human excrement.
The discovery is more significant than it may seem. The nature of the settlement at Qumran is the subject of a lively academic debate.
The traditional view, supported by a majority of scholars since the site was first excavated in the 1950s, is that the settlement was inhabited by Essene monks who observed strict rules of ritual purity and celibacy and who wrote many of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The second school says the people living at Qumran were farmers, potters or soldiers, and had nothing to do with the Essenes. The scrolls, according to this view, were written in Jerusalem and stashed in caves at Qumran by Jewish refugees fleeing the Roman conquest of the city in the first century.
The researchers behind the latrine finding, which is being published in the scholarly journal “Revue de Qumran,” say it supports the traditional view linking the residents of Qumran with the Essenes.
A description of Essene practice by the Jewish historian Josephus Flavius in the first century notes that Essene rules required them to distance themselves from inhabited areas to defecate and “dig a trench a foot deep” which was to then be covered with soil.
Joe Zias, a Jerusalem-based anthropologist, and James Tabor, a Dead Sea Scrolls expert from the University of North Carolina, decided to look for the Qumran latrine. If it was far from the settlement ruins and if the excrement was buried, it would offer evidence the people living at the site were Essenes.
Zias and Tabor identified an area behind a rock outcropping, took soil samples and sent them to Stephanie Harter-Lailheugue, a French scientist specializing in ancient parasites. The samples tested positive for pinworms and two other intestinal parasites found only in human feces. Samples from locations nearer the settlement tested negative.
The excrement traces were found underground – meaning the feces had been buried, as required by Essene law – a nine-minute walk uphill from the settlement.
“A lot of people were concerned with what went into the body, but the Essenes were perhaps the only group in antiquity concerned with what came out,” Zias said. “No one else would have gone to the trouble of walking this far.”
Still, there is no way to date the fecal parasites, which could have been left by Bedouin who are known to have inhabited the area. To counter this, the paper quotes a Bedouin scholar as saying the nomadic tribespeople do not bury their feces.
Another problem is that archaeologists have already identified a toilet at Qumran – inside the settlement. But Zias believes it was for emergencies: In some cases, divine commandments notwithstanding, nine minutes outside the camp was too far to go.
Norman Golb, a history professor at the University of Chicago and a critic of the link between Qumran and the Essenes, called the new paper “an outrageous claim.”
“There’s no plausible connection between what they found and the conclusion that the Essenes lived at Qumran,” Golb said. “Anyone living at the site would have done the same.”
Golb maintains that Qumran’s residents had nothing to do with the Essenes or the Dead Sea Scrolls. Those who claim a connection do so because “they’re committed in their writings to it,” Golb said.
Dead Sea Scrolls scholar Stephen Pfann, of the University of the Holy Land in Jerusalem, said questions about the parasites’ age have to be cleared up, but the find is potentially significant.
Qumran, he says, could have been inhabited at different times by different groups: first by Jews of the Hasmonean dynasty in the second century, then by a monastic group of Essenes who left after an earthquake and were replaced by a lay group of Essene date farmers, then again by Essene ascetics, before being finally taken over by Jewish rebels fighting the Roman legions and abandoned when Judea fell.
“Qumran isn’t one thing, it’s many things,” Pfann said. “This makes it more exciting, but also more complicated to understand.”
REAL ESTATE BOOM IN ROME’S JEWISH QUARTER
Real estate boom uprooting Jews in Roman Ghetto
By Ariel David
The Associated Press
December 30, 2006
Rosa Moscato left the impoverished but familiar existence of Rome’s Jewish quarter only twice in her life.
As a child, she fled to the countryside with her family to escape Nazi persecution, then returned after the war to marry and raise a family in the cramped neighborhood that housed her close-knit community.
But there was little Moscato could do when the run-down area experienced a contemporary renaissance, leading to a real estate boom that attracted wealthy buyers and uprooted longtime residents from the neighborhood where popes once forced Rome’s Jews to live.
Residents and Jewish community officials said evictions and speculative deals are driving out the area’s few remaining Jews, often severing their ties to one of the oldest communities in Europe.
Of more than 13,000 Jews in the Italian capital, fewer than 800 still live in the Ghetto, according to the Jewish community’s archive. After World War II, the area housed 6,000 of the city’s 11,000-strong community.
Moscato, 72, can hardly recognize the cobblestone-paved alleys she grew up in and the 16th-century building where she, her husband and four children shared a two-room flat until 1998, when the family was evicted by owners eager to cash in on the area’s rising property values.
Property values have tripled or quadrupled in a decade, making the Ghetto as pricey as other parts of downtown Rome. Apartments in the neighborhood sell for a minimum of $660 a square foot, according to Carlo Ventura, a real estate consultant at Rome’s chamber of commerce.
Elegant renovation projects and tight security around Jewish community buildings have attracted politicians and TV personalities to the centrally located area.
“It’s no longer our neighborhood. It’s the neighborhood of the police and actors,” said Sergio Di Veroli, Moscato’s 77-year-old husband.
Jews have lived in Rome since the second century B.C. The city’s Jews were first confined to the Ghetto, then a flood-prone slum on the banks of the Tiber River, in 1555, under Pope Paul IV.
Pressured to convert and allowed to hold jobs only as money lenders or rag sellers, the cohesive community continued to live mostly in and around the old Ghetto even after Italy wrested control of Rome from the papacy in 1870, ending the three centuries of segregation.
After renewed persecution during World War II, when Nazi occupiers sent more than 2,000 of Rome’s Jews to their deaths in extermination camps, the Ghetto experienced an exodus as the more prosperous families went looking for better housing, leaving behind mostly low-income residents.
Now, officials say, the property boom is driving out those vulnerable inhabitants – mostly elderly or unemployed people who are often paid by owners to leave.
Despite the changing population, the neighborhood remains the center of the community’s life – holding Rome’s main synagogue, a Jewish school, kosher restaurants and shops selling Jewish religious objects.
“Here my father and my brother lived, and these things must not be forgotten,” said Roberto Calo, 75, who lost most of his family in the Holocaust and who has offers from real estate agencies for his apartment. “From time to time, I receive telephone calls, and they make me incredible offers. But I wouldn’t leave here for any reason.”
* Saddam and cousin discussed killing thousands: tapes
* Internet cafes in the front line of new Gaza violence
CONTENTS
1. Islamic radicals leading revival of Islam in Spain
2. Hizbullah delegation visits Saudi Arabia
3. Internet cafes attacked by radical Islamists in Gaza
4. Factional Palestinian violence spreads into West Bank
5. Tapes show Saddam and his cousin planned to kill thousands of Kurds
6. Shia hostages hanged in streets in revenge for Saddam’s execution
7. Palestinians mourn Saddam
8. Plans to establish an American University in northern Iraq
9. Bahrain marathon runner stripped of citizenship for competing in Israel
10. Irwin Cotler joins defense of tortured Bangladeshi journalist
11. The next “field of Jihad”
12. Mohammed is a popular name
13. “Spanish bishops fear rebirth of Islamic kingdom” (Independent, Jan. 5, 2007)
14. “What’s going on in Somalia?” (Wall Street Journal, Dec. 27, 2006)
15. “Say goodbye to Europe” (Jerusalem Post, Jan. 9, 2007)
[Notes by Tom Gross]
This dispatch contains articles connected to violence in the Middle East and to the spread of Islam there and beyond.
ISLAMIC RADICALS LEADING REVIVAL OF ISLAM IN SPAIN
Spanish bishops say they are increasingly alarmed at plans to recreate the ancient Islamic kingdom of al-Andalus, as a pilgrimage site for Muslims, in the Spanish city of Cordoba. Al-Andalus was the caliphate that ruled Spain for more than five centuries.
Cordoba’s Muslim Association has announced plans that include the construction of a half-size replica of Cordoba’s eighth century great mosque. Other large mosques are also planned for Medina Azahara near Cordoba, Seville and Granada.
Close to one million Muslims live in Spain. In recent years hundreds of mosques have popped up all over Spain, and many residents complain that the big, shiny mosques are more than just centers for culture and worship, but are funded by undemocratic countries promoting Islamic radicalism. (For more, see the first article below, which surprisingly comes from the Independent newspaper of London, the paper of Robert Fisk.)
HIZBULLAH DELEGATION VISITS SAUDI ARABIA
Whilst Saudi Arabia feels threatened by Iran, it seems it is nevertheless maintaining ties with the Iranian proxy militia, Hizbullah.
The “Hizbullah Media Relations Department” has issued a statement (January 4, 2007) on Hizbullah’s al-Manar Television station, saying “that at the invitation of King Abdallah Bin-Abd-al-Aziz, the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, a Hizbullah delegation comprised of Hezbollah Deputy Secretary-General Shaykh Na’im Qasim and Minister Muhammad Funaysh visited the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and met King Abdallah in the city of Jedda where talks were held, focusing on the internal Lebanese situation and the importance of emerging from the current impasse as well as the connection between this situation and regional developments.”
According to the same statement, “King Abdallah expressed his interest in Lebanon and achieving understanding among the Lebanese people…”
Other sources reveal that Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal also attended the meeting, which took place in secret on December 27.
* For more on Saudi Arabia and Iran, see Saudis “to buy nuclear bomb” from Pakistan to counter Iranian threat (Dec. 17, 2006).
INTERNET CAFES ATTACKED BY RADICAL ISLAMISTS IN GAZA
Internet cafes have been targeted by radical Islamists in Gaza. The Islamists are also bombing pool halls and chemists in the land vacated by Israel in the summer of 2005. Many of the cybercafes in Gaza have closed after the attacks.
According to the Times of London, a group calling itself the Swords of Islamic Righteousness is believed to have carried out more than a dozen attacks in recent weeks.
The group issued a warning letter in November threatening to “execute the laws of God” and claiming responsibility for “shooting rocket-propelled grenades and planting bombs at internet cafes in Gaza, which are trying to make a whole generation preoccupied with matters other than jihad and worship.”
The group has also claimed attacks on unveiled women, music shops and motorists playing loud music. Palestinian police claim they are powerless to act since members of the security services are locked in a power struggle between Fatah and Hamas.
Women’s rights groups report an increase in “honor killings” of women suspected of “immoral behavior.”
Mona al-Shawa, of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, said that the situation in Gaza was the worst that she had known. “I have never felt scared like I feel now. It is far worse than when Israel was here.”
Suddenly, the BBC and other leftist media and “human rights” groups so eager to report on every detail of life in Gaza have fallen strangely silent about such abuses of Palestinian rights.
FACTIONAL PALESTINIAN VIOLENCE SPREADS INTO WEST BANK
The internecine warfare that has plagued the Gaza Strip in recent months appears to have spread to the West Bank. Heavy gunfire was reported in the city of Jenin on Saturday night. Earlier in the day, the deputy mayor of Nablus was kidnapped at gunpoint and gunmen stormed the Ramallah office of the Interior Ministry, shot the office manager and took him away. Both Fatah and Hamas are said to be recruiting fighters and stockpiling weapons.
TAPES SHOW SADDAM AND HIS COUSIN PLANNED TO KILL THOUSANDS OF KURDS
The cousin of Saddam Hussein, Hassan al-Majeed, known as “Chemical Ali”, is currently on trial with five other Baath party officials for their roles in the 1988 Anfal (Spoils of War) military campaign in northern Kurdistan.
Prosecutors say that 180,000 people were killed, many of them gassed. According to tapes played at al-Majeed’s trial on Monday, Saddam Hussein and his cousin “Chemical Ali” discussed how chemical weapons would exterminate thousands before unleashing them on Kurds in 1988.
In their conversation, Hassan al-Majeed is heard saying that he “will strike them with chemical weapons and kill them all and damn anyone who is going to say anything.”
Saddam is also heard on the tape confirming that the gas is “effective, especially on those who don’t wear a mask immediately.” He also says that “it exterminates thousands and forces them not to eat or drink and they will have to evacuate their homes without taking anything with them, until we can finally purge them.”
Saddam was hanged on December 30 after being convicted in an earlier trial for his role in the murder of Shi’ites in the 1980s. Majeed, who faces charges of genocide, is considered the main enforcer of the Anfal campaign.
SHIA HOSTAGES HANGED IN STREETS IN REVENGE FOR SADDAM’S EXECUTION
Meanwhile Saddam’s execution has inspired grim revenge. In central Baghdad, Sunni murderers set up a fake security checkpoint around Haifa Street, a mostly Sunni Arab enclave with a small Shiite population. They rounded up Shiites, blindfolded them, pulled them on to the street and then hung them from lampposts and electricity poles. Those hostages who resisted were shot. Others who were still alive had nooses tied around their necks and were then suspended in mid air to choke to death.
The Iraqi government said that 102 bodies were recovered later, with many of them showing signs of torture.
The (London) Daily Telegraph reports “All were left hanging, and the victims received little sympathy from those who witnessed the events. ‘We watched as all these blindfolded men were hung up and some were shot in the head,’ Imad Atwan, a supermarket worker said. ‘We are all Sunni people here so we supported the gunmen. Some of them are the guards of our neighbourhood. Somebody called the police and the guards waited to shoot at them when they arrived. Half an hour after the police fled, they came back with the army and took the bodies away.’”
PALESTINIANS MOURN SADDAM
Palestinians in the West Bank town of Bethlehem opened a “house of condolence” where dozens of people gathered to mourn Saddam Hussein, the executed former dictator of Iraq. In Gaza City a garage was converted into a mourning area for the former Iraqi tyrant.
In addition there was also at least one parade in Saddam’s honor in Gaza, where Palestinians displayed a poster of his image next to former Palestinian dictator Yasser Arafat.
A rally mourning Saddam was also held in Halhoul, near the city of Hebron in the southern West Bank. 500 people burned the Israeli and American flags, and chanted slogans against Iran and against Iraqi Shiites such as Muqtada al-Sadr who opposed Saddam.
During the second Intifada Saddam gave a total of $35 million to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers and other terrorists who had murdered Israelis.
PLANS TO ESTABLISH AN AMERICAN UNIVERSITY IN NORTHERN IRAQ
The London-based international daily al-Sharq al-Awsat has reported on an “ambitious plan” to establish an American University in Iraq, in which studies will be conducted in English and the graduates will be able to compete for positions with high salaries in “practical fields” and computer sciences.
According to the article, the university already has a board of trustees, three candidates to head the university and a sum of $25 million, most of which comes from the American government and Kurdish sources. It is thought the university will need $200-250 million over the course of fifteen years.
The chosen site for the university, which will follow the curriculum of the two famous existing universities in Cairo and Beirut, will be on the outskirts of Sulimaniyya, “far away from the car bombs and the death squads which tear the Arab territories in Iraq.”
A work plan has recently been completed by the international consulting company Mackenzie & Co.
The article (which was translated specially for this email list/website) can be read in Arabic here.
Information on the other two universities can be found at www.aucegypt.edu and www.aub.edu.lb.
BAHRAIN MARATHON RUNNER STRIPPED OF CITIZENSHIP FOR COMPETING IN ISRAEL
Mushir Salem Jawher, a Kenyan runner who defected to Bahrain, has lost his citizenship and livelihood after becoming the first Arab athlete to compete in Israel. Jawher took part in the annual Tiberias marathon in northern Israel and has been told by Bahrain that he is no longer welcome.
In addition, Kenya has told the athlete that he has forfeited the right to represent the country of his birth. Jawher won the event and was subsequently stripped of his Bahraini passport.
After winning, Jawher told the Jerusalem Post that he was “proud” to run in Israel which was “a free country” and that “there should be no restrictions” on where athletes are allowed to run. He added that “When I decided to come I didn’t know it was history for me to be here… For me it was no problem and I hope to come back and compete next year.”
A record 900 athletes, including 21 from Kenya, took part in the Tiberias marathon, which is run around the Sea of Galilee.
Jawher is one of dozens of African athletes who have left their homelands to represent Arab states, such as Bahrain and Qatar, in return for tax-free salaries and lavish accommodation. Born Leonard Mucheru in Kenya in 1978, he moved to Bahrain in 2003, where he took an Arab name, according to the International Association of Athletics Federations.
IRWIN COTLER JOINS DEFENSE OF TORTURED BANGLADESHI JOURNALIST
Noted International Human Rights Attorney, Irwin Cotler, has joined the defense of Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury, the Muslim journalist imprisoned and tortured by Bangladeshi authorities after promoting peace with Israel, and advocating interfaith dialogue.
Choudhury now faces charges of “sedition, treason, and blasphemy” for which he could be put to death. Cotler who will be the international legal counsel for the defense has previously acted as counsel for Nelson Mandela, Andrei Sakharov, Natan Sharansky and Saad Edin Ibrahim, among others.
Cotler, a member of the Canadian Parliament, and an expert in comparative, constitutional and criminal law, has identified eight violations of Choudhury’s rights under Bangladesh law.
Resolutions urging the Bangladeshi government to drop the admittedly false charges have been approved or introduced by several nations including the United States and the European Union.
For more on Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury, please see the sixth point in the dispatch So busy attacking Israel, they forgot about these beheadings (Nov. 21, 2006).
THE NEXT “FIELD OF JIHAD”
On Monday, a U.S. plane targeted two suspected al-Qaeda operatives in southern Somalia. One was reportedly involved in bombing U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the other was said to be the group’s commander in East Africa.
The second article attached below is “a guide to the latest terror-war front” by Jonathan Stevenson, a professor of strategic studies in the Strategic Research Department at the U.S. Naval War College.
Stevenson warns that “Even if Somalia does not become a terrorist redoubt, it could become a potent fount of regional geopolitical instability and perhaps the next ‘field of jihad’ unless diplomatic attention is rallied to rescue the situation.”
Please note that this morning the French newspaper Le Monde reports that British and Canadian citizens were among the dead and captured as Ethiopian forces claimed victory over Islamists in Somalia.
MOHAMMED IS A POPULAR NAME
The third and final article below, by Michael Freund, warns that “soon enough, most of what we now think of as Western Europe will be transformed into a branch of the Muslim world, which is sure to make it an even less welcoming place for Americans, Israelis and for Jews… That, at least, is the unpleasant, yet entirely unavoidable conclusion to be drawn from Europe’s headlong demographic drive toward oblivion.”
As columnist Mark Steyn points out in his acclaimed new book, America Alone, “What’s the Muslim population of Rotterdam? Forty percent. What’s the most popular baby boy’s name in Belgium? Mohammed. In Amsterdam? Mohammed. In Malmo, Sweden? Mohammed.”
Last month, the (London) Daily Telegraph reported that, “Mohammed, and its most common alternative spelling Muhammad, are now more popular babies’ names in England and Wales than George.”
Whilst Freund’s article is a little alarmist, and perhaps exaggerated, at the same time demographics in Europe should not be ignored altogether. They may have far-reaching consequences for the whole Western world.
-- Tom Gross
ARTICLES
AMBITIOUS PLANS TO RECREATE CORDOBA AS A PILGIMAGE SITE FOR MUSLIMS
Spanish bishops fear rebirth of Islamic kingdom
By Elizabeth Nash
The Independent
January 5, 2007
news.independent.co.uk/europe/article2125423.ece
Spain’s bishops are alarmed by ambitious plans to recreate the city of Cordoba – once the heart of the ancient Islamic kingdom of al-Andalus – as a pilgrimage site for Muslims throughout Europe.
Plans include the construction of a half-size replica of Cordoba’s eighth century great mosque, according to the head of Cordoba’s Muslim Association. Funds for the project are being sought from the governments of the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait, and Muslim organisations in Morocco and Egypt. Other big mosques are reportedly planned for Medina Azahara near Cordoba, Seville and Granada.
The bishops of those cities are alarmed at the construction of ostentatious mosques, fearing that the church’s waning influence may be further eclipsed by resurgent Islam financed from abroad. Up to one million Muslims are estimated to live in Spain. Many are drawn by a romantic nostalgia for the lost paradise of Al-Andalus, the caliphate that ruled Spain for more than five centuries.
Last month, Spanish Muslims reasserted their right to pray in Cordoba’s great mosque. The mosque houses within its arches a cathedral built to consolidate Catholic rule after Muslims were expelled from Spain in 1492. Muslims are forbidden to pray in the building.
Mansur Escudero, president of Spain’s Islamic Council, has challenged the current head of Spain’s Episcopal Conference, Bishop Ricardo Blazquez of Bilbao, to explain why Muslims could not pray in Cordoba’s mosque. Mr Escudero said he had been encouraged by the Pope’s act of prayer in Istanbul’s Blue Mosque on his recent visit to Turkey. “It showed that mosques are open to Christian worshippers,” he said. “Could not Muslims pray in Cordoba’s mosque?”
Bishop Blazquez replied that public collective praying was prohibited, but he supposed private or individual prayer was acceptable. Mr Escudero then announced that Muslims would henceforth return to Cordoba’s mosque to pray “in a respectful, private and individual capacity”. The bishops hit back, insisting that “Muslims cannot in any way pray in Cordoba cathedral”.
Spain’s Muslims have been long respectful towards civil and ecclesiastical authorities, but as numbers have grown they have turned to more radical leaders. An alliance of Spanish converts, pro-Moroccan and pro-Saudi leaders took control of one of Spain’s two main Islamic federations last year. Half of the new leaders are imams from Saudi-funded mosques in Madrid and Fuengirola.
Mr Escudero, an ousted moderate who nonetheless remains head of Spain’s umbrella Islamic Council, said he did not favour the construction of flamboyant mosques with foreign money. “I prefer more modest, decent buildings that are backed by Spanish local authorities,” he said, but added: “Muslims have the right to build mosques big and small wherever they like.”
Hundreds of mosques have popped up all over Spain. But churches, and many residents, complain that big, shiny mosques are more than just centres for culture and worship, and say they are funded by undemocratic countries promoting Islamic radicalism.
A GUIDE TO WHAT’S GOING ON IN SOMALIA
What’s going on in Somalia?
A guide to the latest terror-war front.
By Jonathan Stevenson
The Wall Street Journal
December 27, 2006
www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110009440
Though 98% Muslim and long without a functioning government, southern Somalia has not, so far, ripened into the fully fledged terrorist threat that many have feared it would. This week, however, as Ethiopia engaged Islamist Somali militiamen, Somalia became the site of a nascent regional war. The primary combatants are Somalia’s secular Transitional Federal Government (TFG), which is internationally recognized and politically supported by the U.S., and the Islamist “Islamic Courts Union” that holds sway on the ground. They are backed militarily by two fierce rivals, Ethiopia and Eritrea, respectively. The military balance appears indeterminate. Ethiopia has deployed 15,000 to 20,000 troops in Somalia. Eritrea has provided arms to the Islamic Courts militias and sent only about 2,000 troops to support them; but the Islamic Courts hold more territory than the TFG and have greater indigenous assets and popular support. Even if Somalia does not become a terrorist redoubt, it could become a potent fount of regional geopolitical instability and perhaps the next “field of jihad” unless diplomatic attention is rallied to rescue the situation.
Ethiopia has a politically dominant Christian tradition and is vigorously opposed to Islamism. Al-Ittihad al-Islamiah, a Somali Islamist group aligned with the Islamic Courts, has sought to force the secession of Ethiopia’s heavily ethnic Somali Ogaden region, and Ethiopian troops were responsible for eliminating several terrorist training camps run by al-Ittihad in the late 1990s. Although about half Muslim and half Christian, Eritrea’s support for the Islamic Courts rests on its strategic enmity toward Ethiopia. The Islamic Courts are also politically and financially backed by several Muslim states, including Egypt, Djibouti, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Libya and Sudan. Ethiopia’s preventive intervention against the Islamic Courts – tacitly approved by the U.S. – prompted them to declare jihad against Ethiopia in November. Meanwhile, on Dec. 7 the U.N. Security Council unanimously adopted U.S.-sponsored Resolution 1725, authorizing the deployment of an African force in Somalia to protect the TFG and partially lifting a weapons embargo to Somali factions, which stands to strengthen the TFG and secular militias. The resolution spurred the Islamic Courts to declare jihad against any U.N. – sanctioned force, and the Eritrean government branded it “an attack on the Somali people.” Foreign jihadists are reported to be infiltrating Somali territory already.
The volatile situation in Somalia presents the West with a thorny and immediate problem. To quell geopolitical tensions created by Ethiopia and Eritrea’s intervention, a U.N.-sanctioned force would have to be led by a major power. Yet even if such a power could afford the troops and materiel, the insertion of a significant number of Western-led foreign troops would run the risk of attracting (as in Iraq) still more foreign jihadists to Somalia and inspiring terrorist attacks worldwide.
The U.N. and the African Union (AU) support the TFG, and the former has authorized peacekeeping troops. In hopes of minimizing regional tensions, the Security Council resolution bars the participation of neighboring nations Kenya and Djibouti as well as Ethiopia in any peacekeeping contingent, and limits the notional outside force to physically protecting the TFG in and near Baidoa, and to training TFG security forces. But there is little manpower available for any serious effort. The resolution also does not deal with foreign forces already in Somalia. While the resolution is nobly intended to promote political negotiations between the TFG and the Islamic Courts Union, coupled with Ethiopia’s substantial military commitment to the TFG it may have had the effect of providing the TFG with enough political cover to defer dialogue. Furthermore, only Uganda has offered troops, and has done so ambivalently and against domestic public opinion. In any case, though trained by the French and the British, Ugandan troops would probably be both numerically and professionally inadequate.
Although Washington would probably provide logistical support and some funding for a Uganda-led force, it has essentially charged Uganda and the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) – most of whose members (Djibouti, Eritrea, Sudan and, less rigidly, Kenya) oppose intervention – with executing Resolution 1725. Accordingly, the military mission, in any case of dubious political value, is unlikely to gather momentum. Meanwhile, rough military parity allows the two Somali factions to procrastinate diplomatically.
While at times disingenuously denying that it has deployed troops in Somalia, Ethiopia has indicated that any troops are intended as a deterrent and that it is not eager to engage in a long war. The Islamic Courts, for their part, have demonstrated a degree of caution. Fatalities still probably number only dozens rather than hundreds. Thus far, the major powers have tacitly allowed Ethiopia and Eritrea to keep assets deployed in Somalia while pressuring both to refrain from escalating to all-out war. But these weak constraints cannot produce operational equilibrium between the TFG and the Islamic Courts Union for long enough to allow effective major-power attention to gravitate to Somalia before war arises.
Absent an unattainably strong peace-enforcement contingent, the only solution would appear to be robust diplomacy aimed at stabilizing the Somali situation by a power-sharing arrangement between the TFG and the Islamic Courts. Both the U.N. and the AU, as well as the U.S. and key European capitals, however, have their hands full with even more pressing regional matters, such as Darfur. Indeed, all save the AU are overstretched by Iraq, Afghanistan and the campaign against Islamist terrorism. They cannot be expected to devote serious diplomatic attention to Somalia in the short term. While Yemen and the Arab League have made attempts to facilitate dialogue, they are not likely to have the influence to close a sustainable deal.
The EU, however, has shown appreciation for the gravity of the crisis. On Dec. 8, EU development minister Louis Michel held separate talks with the TFG and the Islamic Courts in hopes of lowering tensions, albeit to no clear avail. Kenya, the most effective broker in the region on Somali issues, has sponsored the TFG. But Nairobi – constrained by a rising cross-border threat from the Islamic Courts and political pressures from its own substantial ethnic Somali population – has defaulted to a position of “neutrality.” Since open conflict could send hundreds of thousands of refugees over its border, however, Nairobi may abandon timidity and push for negotiations. Religious leaders in Kenya have urged as much. With the EU’s diplomatic sponsorship and residual U.S. support, such an effort might enforce a pause and bring the four principals – the TFG, the Islamic Courts, Ethiopia and Eritrea – to the table. Otherwise, only further escalation is likely to bring decisive major-power attention to the Horn of Africa.
“IF YOU REALLY WANT TO SEE THE EIFFEL TOWER UP CLOSE, YOU HAD BEST NOT DELAY”
Say goodbye to Europe
By Michael Freund
The Jerusalem Post
January 9, 2007
www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1167467696394&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
If you ever wanted to see Paris or Rome before you die, but haven’t had a chance to do so, you might want to hurry. Soon enough, most of what we now think of as Western Europe will be transformed into a branch of the Muslim world, which is sure to make it an even less welcoming place for Americans, Israelis and for Jews.
That, at least, is the unpleasant, yet entirely unavoidable conclusion to be drawn from Europe’s headlong demographic drive toward oblivion.
Think I’m exaggerating? Consider a few cold hard facts.
According to a recent report by the Rand Corporation, “Across Europe, birth rates are falling and family sizes are shrinking. The total fertility rate is now less than two children per woman in every member nation in the European Union.”
Needless to say, demographers consider a birthrate of 2.1 children per family to be the replacement level at which a society’s population size remains stable. Barring large-scale immigration, anything less means decline and dissolution.
A research study published last year in the International Journal of Andrology found a similar trend, concluding that, “Fertility rates have fallen and are now below replacement level in all European Union (EU) Member States. In the 20-year period since 1982,” it noted, “most EU Member State countries have had total fertility rates continuously below replacement level.”
At the bottom of the list are Spain, Italy and Greece, where birthrates hover around just 1.3 per couple, leading some forecasters to suggest, for example, that Italy’s population could shrink by one-third by the middle of the century.
Others, such as Germany’s 1.37, the UK’s 1.74 and Sweden’s 1.75, aren’t all much better.
The figures are so bad that in many European countries, the total number of deaths each year has actually begun to exceed the number of births.
Indeed, the Council of Europe’s 2004 Demographic Yearbook warned that, “for Europe as a whole, more people died in 2003 than were born.” In 1990, said the yearbook, “three countries – Germany, Bulgaria and Hungary – had negative natural growth for the first time. By 2002, it was negative in fifteen countries.”
Last year, after the publication of statistics revealing that 30 percent of German women have not had children, Germany’s family minister, Ursula von der Leyen, caused a stir when she said that if her nation’s birth rate did not turn around, the country would have to “turn out the light.” And while Europeans may be busy everywhere but in the bedroom, the Muslim populations in their midst are proving far more expansive.
As columnist Mark Steyn points out in his must-read new book, America Alone, “What’s the Muslim population of Rotterdam? Forty percent. What’s the most popular baby boy’s name in Belgium? Mohammed. In Amsterdam? Mohammed. In Malmo, Sweden? Mohammed.”
Last month, the UK Daily Telegraph reported that, “Mohammed, and its most common alternative spelling Muhammad, are now more popular babies’ names in England and Wales than George.”
This, said the paper, using typically British understatement, “reflects the diverse ethnic mix of the population.”
But that “mix,” so to speak, is rapidly changing – and not in traditional Europe’s favor.
Islam, by all accounts, is the fastest growing religion in Europe, spurred by immigration and high fertility rates. According to projections by the US federal government’s National Intelligence Council, the continent’s current Muslim population of 20 million will likely double by 2025.
And as Bruce Bawer noted last year in While Europe Slept, “Already, in most of Western Europe, 16 to 20 percent of children are Muslims…within a couple of generations many [European] countries will have Muslim majorities.”
Not since September 8, 1683, when the Ottomans were threatening to breach the walls of Vienna, has Islam been so perilously close to seizing control over Western Europe.
The implications of all this are far graver than we can even begin to imagine, and it is not just a matter of choosing new and more hospitable tourist destinations.
An increasingly Islamified Europe will prove ever more hostile to Israel and America, and this trend will only intensify as the Muslim population there continues to grow.
Even if European governments succeed in reversing the curve, which seems highly unlikely, it will be decades before it would begin to be felt. In the meantime, however, Muslim political power on the continent will develop and expand, and European leaders will be hard-pressed to ignore their demands.
This makes it far less likely that Israel and the US can count on Europe – if they ever really could – at times of crisis in the decades ahead. Just pick an issue, from the war on terror to Palestinian statehood, and you’ll see what I mean.
For however unbalanced Europe’s stance has been until now, it will likely only grow worse in the years to come.
Europe as we know it is a thing of the past, and it is time for Israeli and American decision-makers to take this into account as they plan for the future. The face of Europe is changing rapidly, and with it the continent’s social and political make-up.
So if you really want to see the Eiffel Tower up close, you had best not delay. Before you know it, it might just turn into a minaret.
* Leaked BBC email shows anti-Israel bias as usual
* Associated Press apologizes for claiming “Zionists exaggerated the number of Jews killed by the Nazis”
* Mohammad Ali Ramin, advisor to Iranian President Ahmadinejad: “Hitler was Jewish”
CONTENTS
1. BBC, biased as usual
2. “It’s a false objective to be objective” – Jeremy Bowen
3. AP apologizes for Holocaust lie
4. “Adolf Hitler developed an aversion to Judaism because his mother was a Jewish whore”
5. Reformist Iranian politicians criticize Holocaust conference
6. BBC email: Mini briefing on the Israelis and Palestinians (By Jeremy Bowen, Jan. 5, 2007)
7. “Correction: Iran – Holocaust – Conference” (AP, Jan. 9, 2007)
8. “Mohammad Ali Ramin, advisor to Iranian President Ahmadinejad: ‘Hitler was Jewish’” (MEMRI, Jan. 3, 2007)
BBC, BIASED AS USUAL
Below is an email analysis sent to senior BBC staff by the supposedly impartial BBC Middle East Editor, Jeremy Bowen, on what lies ahead this year.
As my colleague Stephen Pollard points out: “It’s all too predictable. The ‘fragmentation’ of Palestinian society has, in Mr Bowen’s view, nothing to do with the Palestinians and everything to do with Israel (‘the death of hope, caused by a cocktail of Israel’s military activities, land expropriation and settlement building – and the financial sanctions imposed on the Hamas led government’). Indeed, Israel is to blame for almost everything. The Palestinians are not responsible for anything; Israel is the culpable party.
“He has contempt for every Israeli politician he mentions; Ehud Barak, for instance, is described as having killed ‘various Palestinians’, written as if he did so for the sake of it.”
Tom Gross adds: This is, apparently, what passes for high-level analysis at the BBC. To remind readers, the BBC is the world’s most lavishly publicly-funded news organization. In return for this license-payers funding, the BBC is under a legal obligation to be even-handed. When it comes to America and even more so to Israel, it is nothing of the sort.
The BBC’s Charter and its Producers Guidelines state: “Due impartiality lies at the heart of the BBC. All programs and services should be open minded, fair and show a respect for truth… [BBC reports should] contain comprehensive, authoritative and impartial coverage of news and current affairs in the United Kingdom and throughout the world…”
For more, see Living in a Bubble: The BBC’s very own Mideast foreign policy.
“IT’S A FALSE OBJECTIVE TO BE OBJECTIVE” -- JEREMY BOWEN
In his analysis, Bowen has nothing to say about the squandered billions in foreign aid (the Palestinians are the biggest per capita recipients of aid in history – by way of comparison, they have received five times more than Europeans received in the Marshall plan, once adjusted for today’s figures.) There is nothing from Bowen about the Palestinian rocket attacks into Israel from Gaza, which continue on a daily basis even while Israel holds strictly to a ceasefire. Apparently, according to Bowen, Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza has been “the death of hope.”
This is what Bowen had to say in a recent article in the Independent (December 11, 2006):
“For the BBC’s Middle East Editor, steering a neutral path can sometimes seems impossible. Jeremy Bowen tells Ian Burrell how he deals with the challenge of ‘objectivity.’”
“Not only must he demystify the Middle East, but he must do so in language that does not, through an inappropriate phrase or image, inflame suspicions that the BBC is biased. Bowen, who is a contributor to the BBC’s new College of Journalism, is honest enough to say that objectivity is beyond him. “We all come from somewhere; we all have a prism through which we see the world; we all have an education, and views and experiences. It’s a false objective to be objective.’”
“Some regard us as being actively anti-Israel and even anti-Semitic. I think it’s unfortunate because it is not true.” -- Jeremy Bowen
“I’m not a cheerleader for any side.” -- Jeremy Bowen
Among previous dispatches on this list citing Bowen, please see:
* The French love bombing (but not by Israel) (July 18, 2006)
* BBC’s former Mideast correspondent: BBC is much too pro-Israel (June 22, 2004)
* Hatred in the air: The BBC, Israel and anti-Semitism (Aug. 20, 2003)
AP APOLOGIZES FOR HOLOCAUST LIE
After Bowen’s email, I attach “Correction: Iran – Holocaust – Conference.”
Finally today, the world’s biggest news agency, the Associated Press, has apologized for having “erroneously attributed a claim that Zionists have exaggerated the number of Jews killed by the Nazis.”
The Associated Press made the claim in a Dec. 12 story about an Iranian-sponsored conference on the Holocaust.
“ADOLF HITLER DEVELOPED AN AVERSION TO JUDAISM BECAUSE HIS MOTHER WAS A JEWISH WHORE”
In a December 28, 2006 interview with the Iranian website Baztab, which is affiliated with Iranian Expediency Council Secretary Mohsen Rezai, Iranian Presidential Advisor Mohammad Ali Ramin said that Hitler was Jewish, and that Hitler’s policies were aimed at helping Zionists. Ramin added that Hitler acted under the influence of his powerful Jewish associates and in cooperation with Britain, since the latter shared his desire to force the Jews out of Europe.
Ramin was recently appointed secretary-general of the new “world foundation for Holocaust Studies” established at the Iranian Holocaust denial conference in December.
The full item is translated below, courtesy of MEMRI.
REFORMIST IRANIAN POLITICIANS CRITICIZE HOLOCAUST CONFERENCE
Reformists in the Iranian Parliament have condemned President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s administration for the convening of the controversial Holocaust denial conference. The reformers, who represent a 42-member faction, blamed the current regime for Iran’s deepening diplomatic isolation. “The only way to pass this crisis is to build confidence… but holding a Holocaust conference and financing the Hamas government creates mistrust and tension,” said Noureddin Pirmoazzen, spokesman for the reformist faction.
Meanwhile, the Simon Wiesenthal Center (the directors of which are, like the directors of MEMRI, long-time subscribers to this email list) has posted a Persian translation of its “36 Questions about the Holocaust” online at www.wiesenthal.com/36questionsinfarsi.
-- Tom Gross
BBC EMAIL: MINI BRIEFING ON THE ISRAELIS AND PALESTINIANS
-----Original Message-----
From: Jeremy Bowen
To: Editorial Board; Newsg World-Bureaux-Eds; Newsg World Asseds; News Leadership Group; Mark Byford & PA; Simon Wilson-NEWS; Jerusalem Bureau;
Newsg World-Affairs-Unit
Sent: Fri Jan 05 15:16:16 2007
Subject: Mini briefing on the Israeli and Palestinians
2007 has started as unpromisingly as 2006 ended. The outlook is bleak because of fundamental instabilities and weaknesses on both sides.
Israel’s major military incursion into Ramallah on Thursday, killing four Palestinians after a botched arrest operation, was a reminder of the non stop pressures of the Israeli occupation.
What is new in the last year, and will be one of the big stories in the coming twelve months, is the way that Palestinian society, which used to draw strength from resistance to the occupation, is now fragmenting.
The reason is the death of hope, caused by a cocktail of Israel’s military activities, land expropriation and settlement building – and the financial sanctions imposed on the Hamas led government which are destroying Palestinian institutions that were anyway flawed and fragile.
The result is that internecine violence between Hamas and Fatah is getting worse. On Thursday six people were killed in clashes between them in Gaza. The death of a major figure on either side would spark something much more serious.
In Israel the political turmoil that followed the inconclusive war with Hezbollah last summer continues unabated.
There are signs that PM Ehud Olmert is trying to set up his coalition partner Amir Peretz as a scapegoat for Israel’s problems during the war and since, by ousting him from the defence ministry. Olmert may be hoping he’ll get away with it because Peretz’s position as Labour leader is already under attack from within his own party. Peretz’s people say that if Olmert tries it, the government will fall.
Even if does manage to demote Peretz, he probably won’t improve his parlous position in the polls. It is exactly a year since Ariel Sharon’s stroke, so Israelis are comparing their lost leader with the one they have now, and finding him wanting. An air of incompetence hangs around Olmert when it comes to military matters. Typical was the timing of the raid in Ramallah, which ruined yesterday’s summit with Mubarak which was supposed to bring closer the release of the captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.
Olmert wants to replace Peretz at the defence ministry with Ehud Barak, the former Prime Minister. Barak is a retired general, former head of the Israeli army and its most decorated soldier. (Among his many exploits was disguising himself as a woman during a raid in Beirut to kill various Palestinians). The feeling in Israel is that 2007 will be a year of wars, so aside from coalition politics Olmert wants to have a warrior next to him when they make the tough decisions. The intray could include whether or not to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Another serious problem for Olmert is that yet another corruption scandal is lapping close to him. This time the head of the PM’s office in Jerusalem is under house arrest for her alleged role in corruption in Israel’s tax authority. Olmert is not yet implicated, though he’s already been under investigation over separate allegations.
The political crises in Israel – and violent political disintegration among the Palestinians – are not just internal matters. They make it impossible for the Israelis and the Palestinians to engage in a meaningful political dialogue, assuming that their protestations that they want one are true. (The one meeting that Olmert has had with Mahmoud Abbas can hardly be called a process.)
Only strong Israeli and Palestinian leaders would be able to make the tough choices necessary to relieve the serious pressures that are building up in the holy land. To persuade their people to make the necessary concessions, they would need a strong political base, which neither Olmert nor Abbas possess.
Because they are weak – many would say lame ducks – don’t expect any progress. And since an uneasy status quo cannot hold, no political progress will equal more violence.
CORRECTION: IRAN – HOLOCAUST – CONFERENCE
Correction: Iran – Holocaust – Conference
The Associated Press
January 9, 2007
In a Dec. 12 story about an Iranian-sponsored conference on the Holocaust, The Associated Press erroneously attributed a claim that Zionists have exaggerated the number of Jews killed by the Nazis.
Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss, who attended the conference with members of the group Neturei Karta, denied making such a statement. He said the claim, reported by Iran’s state news agency and television, does not reflect his group’s position. He opposes the state of Israel, and believes Israelis have used the Holocaust to gain sympathy and advantage but doesn’t believe the Holocaust toll is exaggerated.
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iran’s hard-line president said Tuesday that Israel will one day be “wiped out” as the Soviet Union was, drawing applause from participants in a conference casting doubt on the Holocaust.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s comments were likely to further fuel the outcry prompted by the two-day gathering, which has gathered some of Europe’s and the United States’ best-known Holocaust deniers.
Anger over the conference could further isolate Iran as the West considers sanctions in the standoff over Tehran’s nuclear program.
But Ahmadinejad appeared to revel in his meeting Tuesday with conference delegates, shaking hands with American participants and sitting near six anti-Israel Jewish participants, dressed in black ultra-Orthodox coats and hats.
“The Zionist regime will be wiped out soon the same way the Soviet Union was, and humanity will achieve freedom,” Ahmadinejad said during Tuesday’s meeting in his offices, according to the official IRNA news agency.
He called for elections among “Jews, Christians and Muslims so the population of Palestine can select their government and destiny for themselves in a democratic manner.”
Ahmadinejad has used anti-Israeli rhetoric and cast doubt on the Holocaust to rally anti-Western supporters at home and abroad, particularly in Asia and the Middle East. Several times he has referred to the Holocaust as a “myth” used to impose the state of Israel on the Arab world.
“The Holocaust is the device used as the pillar of Zionist imperialism, Zionist aggression, Zionist terror and Zionist murder,” David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader and former state representative in Louisiana, told The Associated Press.
Ahmadinejad announced the conference would set up a “fact-finding commission” to determine whether the Holocaust happened or not. The commission will “help end a 60-year-old dispute,” he said.
The Tehran conference was touted by participants and organizers as an exercise in academic freedom and a chance to openly consider whether 6 million Jews really died in the Holocaust, away from Western taboos and the restrictions imposed on scholars in Europe, where some countries have made it a crime to deny the Nazi genocide during World War II.
It gathered 67 writers and researchers from 30 countries, most of whom argue that either the Holocaust did not happen or that it was vastly exaggerated. Many have been jailed or fined in France, Germany or Austria, where it is illegal to deny the Holocaust.
Participants milled around a model of the Auschwitz concentration camp brought by one speaker, Australian Frederick Toben, who uses the mock-up in lectures contending that the camp was too small to kill mass numbers of Jews. More than 1 million people are estimated to have been killed there.
Rabbi Moshe David Weiss, one of six members attending from the group Jews United Against Zionism, said he opposes the state of Israel, and believes Israelis have used the Holocaust to gain sympathy and advantage; but he doesn’t believe the Holocaust toll is exaggerated. He and his group reject the creation of Israel on the grounds that it violates Jewish religious law, but he said he doesn’t believe the Holocaust toll is exaggerated.
“They have used the Holocaust as a device to justify their oppression,” he said.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Tuesday that the conference was “shocking beyond belief” and “a symbol of sectarianism and hatred.”
In Washington, the White House condemned Iran for convening a conference it called “an affront to the entire civilized world.”
ADVISOR TO AHMADINEJAD: “HITLER WAS JEWISH”
Mohammad Ali Ramin, advisor to Iranian President Ahmadinejad: “Hitler was Jewish”
MEMRI
January 3, 2007
www.memri.org/bin/opener_latest.cgi?ID=SD140807
In a December 28, 2006 interview with the Iranian website Baztab, which is affiliated with Iranian Expediency Council Secretary Mohsen Rezai, Iranian Presidential Advisor Mohammad Ali Ramin said that Hitler was Jewish, and that Hitler’s policies were aimed at bringing about the establishment of a Jewish state. Ramin added that Hitler acted under the influence of his powerful Jewish associates and in cooperation with Britain, since the latter shared his desire to force the Jews out of Europe. [1]
Ramin was recently appointed secretary-general of the new “world foundation for Holocaust Studies” established at the Iranian Holocaust Denial Conference in December. [2]
The following are excerpts from the interview: [3]
Adolf Hitler... Developed an Aversion to Judaism Because His Mother Was a Jewish Whore
“The Bolshevik Soviet government in Lenin’s time, and later, in Stalin’s – both of whom were Jewish, though they presented themselves as Marxists and atheists... – was one of the forces that, until the Second World War, cooperated with Hitler in promoting the idea of establishing the State of Israel. A book that was published about this... – titled Adolf Hitler, Founder of Israel by Hennecke Kardel, a German born in 1922 – proves that Hitler was Jewish, and that his grandmother was a Jewish prostitute. [Hitler’s] father went by his mother’s Jewish name until he was 40, and later changed his surname to Hitler.
“Adolf Hitler himself developed an aversion to Judaism because his mother was a Jewish whore. He first received [negative] information about the Jews in an Austrian monastery, (the book presents details and pictures of it), and from then on, he [tried] to escape his Judaism.
“Thus... Hitler simultaneously developed both feelings of solidarity with Judaism and feelings of hatred towards it, and this emotional ambivalence shaped his behavior towards the Jews. On the one hand, his entire family, the people who shared his views, and his associates who brought him into power and stood by him to the last – including his lovers and his personal doctor – were [all] Jewish. On the other hand, he welcomed the policy of expelling the Jews from Central Europe for two other reasons: Firstly, the establishment of a Jewish government in Palestine was an aspiration of the rich and influential Jews who surrounded him. Secondly, exiling the Jews from Europe and Germany was a general and historical demand of the Western Christian nations. With the full support of the British, and in coordination with them, Hitler addressed this general demand and [thereby] managed to gain widespread popularity in Europe. Obviously, publishing writings and information of this sort is forbidden in Germany and in the West...
“The Zionists recently... destroyed many documents and papers pertaining to the period before the war, which contained authentic statistics and figures regarding the Jews, such as how many Jews there were, where they [lived] and how they operated. One of the places that was destroyed completely and burned [to the ground] – and which... contained the most valuable documents pertaining to this matter – was the [building of] the newspaper Pravda, which had been published in Moscow for 80 years. On February 10, 2006, the building was set ablaze, and its entire archive, with all its back issues and photographs, was burned and destroyed, and not a trace of it was left. Nobody - not a single news agency anywhere in the world – investigated this historical crime or discussed it extensively...”
My Suggestion Was to Establish an NGO, in Iran or Elsewhere, [To] Reexamine [the Holocaust]... with the Help of International Forums
“My suggestion was to establish an NGO, in Iran or elsewhere, that would reexamine this issue and investigate it with the help of international forums. But after making enquiries, we saw that nobody in the [entire] world had the courage to raise this issue and investigate it. Anyone who speaks or publishes anything about it is silenced immediately, before [the issue] can be examined. [That is why] we got the idea of organizing a non-governmental conference with the support of the Iranian government, but we [subsequently] discovered that nobody in the world would respond to it, and that it was totally ignored in the news.
“Naturally, I do not want us to take a one-sided view of the Holocaust, and to deny it out of hand, since we do not have sufficient and complete information about it. The purpose of the conference was to question the order that the West has imposed upon us in this manner...”
[1] For more Holocaust denial by Mohammad Ali Ramin, see MEMRI Special Dispatch No. 1186, “Iranian Presidential Advisor Mohammad Ali Ramin: ‘The Resolution of the Holocaust Issue Will End in the Destruction of Israel,’” June 15, 2006, http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP118606; for more on Iran’s use of Holocaust denial, see MEMRI Inquiry & Analysis No. 307, “The Role of Holocaust Denial in the Ideology and Strategy of The Iranian Regime,” December 15, 2006, http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=ia&ID=IA30706.
[2] MEMRI Special Dispatch No. 1397, “Iran Holocaust Denial Conference Announces Plan to Establish World Foundation for Holocaust Studies,” December 15, 2006, http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP139706.
[3] Baztab, December 28, 2006
* This email list/website has previously included articles on Israel’s gay scene and on the treatment of homosexuals in the Arab world. See, for example, the fourth and fifth articles in the dispatch titled Harry Potter taught at Bar-Ilan University (June 24, 2003).
CONTENTS
1. Brutality against homosexuals in the Arab world
2. “We are their only hope”
3. Israel: A new gay icon?
4. Gay pride in Israel; Gay torture in the West Bank
5. Islamic militia target gays in Iraq
6. “The Six Day Phwoar” (By Chas Newkey-Burden, Attitude, Dec. 2006)
7. “Unspeakable love” (By Brian Whitaker, Jewish Quarterly, Summer 2006)
8. “Saddam execution unlikely to end violence against Iraq gays” (365Gay.com, Dec. 31, 2006)
BRUTALITY AGAINST HOMOSEXUALS IN THE ARAB WORLD
I attach an article from “Attitude,” a gay magazine based in the UK, which explores the gay scene in Israel. (A shorter, adapted version of the article also appears on Ynet.)
The article is by British journalist Chas Newkey-Burden, who is a subscriber to this email list. He compares the freedom and rights afforded to homosexuals in Israel with the lack of freedom given to them in the rest of the Middle East:
“In neighbouring Arab states, laws governing homosexuality are brutal. In Lebanon, you can face a year in prison for being gay. In Saudi Arabia, homosexuality is punishable by death. In Iran they’ve managed to come up with an even worse sentence: first torture, then death. These are not just theoretical punishments, these sentences are regularly carried out.
“The legal situation in the Palestinian territories is less clear-cut but gay men are routinely and brutally tortured by their families and communities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Gay Palestinians are tortured and murdered by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas.”
The violence and discrimination against homosexuals in the Arab world is all but ignored by the western media and by politicians supposedly concerned with human rights, such as the left-wing mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, who regularly coddles up to the most homophobic and anti-Semitic of Islamic clerics.
“WE ARE THEIR ONLY HOPE”
Newkey-Burden points out the lengths to which organizations in Israel go to make homosexual tourists feel comfortable, “For instance, tourist industry conventions in Israel include seminars on gay tourists and how to treat them,” he says.
“Perhaps the most surprising gay visitors to Israel are those from the West Bank and Gaza Strip. AGUDA organises Arabic gay evenings where gay Palestinians are invited to come and party with Israelis – and many take up the invitation. ‘We are their only hope,’ he says. ‘If they came out where they live, they would be killed but they can come and party with us in Israel.’”
ISRAEL: A NEW GAY ICON?
Newkey-Burden, who is not Jewish and was on his first trip to Israel, was so impressed with Israel that he concludes that “We’ve crowned a lot of gay icons down the years: artists, musicians and others who have inspired us, thrilled us and enjoyed a deep mutual admiration with us. Many of them have overcome enormous brutality and responded to that brutality with dignity and in style. To that list of gay icons we can now perhaps add the country of Israel, which for gay men represents a beacon of light in a dark region, and a land of enormous promise and pleasure.”
GAY PRIDE IN ISRAEL; GAY TORTURE IN THE WEST BANK
The second article below is by Brian Whitaker, The Guardian’s Middle East editor. The Guardian is one of the most hostile papers to Israel in the world so it comes as no surprise that Whitaker is generally not very pro-Israel, although this piece is a partial exception. The piece appears in the prestigious British publication, The Jewish Quarterly.
Whitaker acknowledges that hundreds of Palestinian homosexuals have sought and received political asylum in Israel, although he says that some of them are then effectively forced by the Israeli authorities to work as undercover agents or informants for Israel in return for permanent residency in the Jewish state.
Whitaker is author of the book “Unspeakable Love: Gay and Lesbian Life in the Middle East.”
For more on Brian Whitaker, please see the following two dispatches:
* The Guardian attacks Memri (Aug. 13, 2002)
* Memri responds to the Guardian (Aug. 27, 2002)
ISLAMIC MILITIA TARGET GAYS IN IRAQ
The third article attached below concerns gays in Iraq, reporting on how armed Shia and Sunni Islamic militia are roaming the streets of the capital Baghdad targeting gay men and lesbians for kidnap and/or murder. Last March, prominent Shiite cleric Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani called for gays to be killed.
-- Tom Gross
“A BEACON OF LIGHT IN A DARK REGION”
The Six Day Phwoar
By Chas Newkey-Burden
Attitude (UK gay magazine)
December 2006
Tel Aviv resident Justin Rudzki was strolling across the city’s busy Dizengoff Square one day when he spotted an Arab man. Their eyes met and the two men approached one another. But this wasn’t to be yet another moment of conflict between Jew and Arab in the Middle East. The pair instead swapped phone numbers and arranged a date. You might not expect such an encounter to be able to occur in Israel. But then the more you look into gay life in this country, the more surprises you uncover.
When I told friends I was visiting Israel, the common response was “Be careful, make sure you don’t get killed.” In fact, such is the level of security there, I felt far, far safer in Israel than I do in London. Similarly, when I told friends I was visiting Israel to write a feature for a gay magazine, the common response was: “Be careful, I bet it’s a really homophobic country.”
It is nothing of the sort. Workplace discrimination against gay people is outlawed; the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) has many openly gay members; in schools, teenagers learn about the difficulties of being gay and the importance of treating all sexualities equally. The country’s army, the Israel Defence Force has many dozens of openly gay high-ranking officers who, like all gay soldiers in its ranks, are treated equally by order of the government. The Supreme Court has ruled that gay couples are eligible for spousal and widower benefits. The country has many gay football teams. Nearly all mainstream television dramas in Israel regularly feature gay storylines. When transsexual Dana International won the 1998 Eurovision Song Contest as Israel’s representative, 80 per cent of polled Israelis called her “an appropriate representative of Israel”.
Meanwhile, in neighbouring Arab states, laws governing homosexuality are brutal. In Lebanon, you can face a year in prison for being gay. In Saudi Arabia, homosexuality is punishable by death. In Iran they’ve managed to come up with an even worse sentence: first torture, then death. These are not just theoretical punishments, these sentences are regularly carried out.
The legal situation in the Palestinian territories is less clear-cut but gay men are routinely and brutally tortured by their families and communities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Gay Palestinians are tortured and murdered by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas.
So in terms of legislation, Israel is incredibly advanced by any standard, let alone that of a Middle Eastern country which is less than 60 years old. But winning laws is one challenge, winning the hearts and minds of a nation is another altogether. From my experiences there, the gay community in Israel are winning this challenge too. I made a point throughout my trip of telling all of the many ordinary, heterosexual Israelis I encountered that I was in the country to research a feature for a gay magazine. Without exception they were delighted to hear this and deeply proud of their country’s record on gay rights.
A religious state with a positive gay rights record: Israel can in this sense be seen as a shining example to other religious states, be they Christian or Muslim. There is no doubt that Judaism is disapproving of homosexuality and yet the world’s only Jewish state has managed to pass pro-gay legislation and create widely-welcoming atmosphere for its gay citizens and visitors. Maybe it is the persecution that the Jewish people have faced for centuries that makes them so accepting of gay people. Or perhaps the threats they still face from their neighbours give them a sharper sense of priority. Whatever the case, the widespread sense of tolerance is tangible.
Not that this tolerance means, however, that Israeli gay men do not face personal and religious challenges in coming to terms with their sexuality. When I met 20-year-old Yossi Herzog in Tel Aviv, those contradictions and challenges were apparent. Slim, pretty and lively, at first sight he could be any of the boys who queue outside London’s G.A.Y. club on a Saturday night. But as we passed near one of Tel Aviv’s synagogues, he nervously clipped a skull cap on his head. When he took me for a falafel in bustling Shenkin Street, he went through a pre-meal kosher blessing. But just minutes later, as we sat on the shoreline in the blistering afternoon heat, we were discussing what we do and don’t like doing in bed with other guys. Just like any other gay guys might. Then, I stepped away to take a phone call on my mobile and when I returned, he had put his skull cap back on and was reading Jewish prayers.
I had interviewed Yossi the previous evening on Tel Aviv’s “Hilton beach” – it is opposite the Hilton hotel – which is also known as the “Gay beach”, where men openly check each other out and pick each other up. It is also popular among dog-walkers and surfers so it is also known as the Dog beach and the Surfing beach. How many names can one beach have? Interestingly, it is neighboured by the city’s Religious beach which has separate bathing days for men and women. And all this is just yards from Tel Aviv’s Independence Park, which is the main gay cruising area in Tel Aviv – the cruising park in Jerusalem has the same name.
Yossi says he’s never been cruising at Tel Aviv’s Independence Park. Well, the lad has hardly had a chance, he only made his aliyah – immigration to Israel – four weeks prior to the interview. He grew up in the USA but had for the previous two years lived in the UK. He can therefore easily compare the UK gay scene with the Israeli one.
“I much prefer the gay scene here,” he says. “For a start, the men are so much hotter,” he beams. “Here the men are tall, slim and tanned. Not like in the UK where they are more like cottage cheese – all pasty and chunky.
“Israelis are very blunt, straightforward people and that helps make gay life here much more enjoyable than it is in England. Here, if you like someone you tell them. If you don’t like someone, you tell them. There are none of the “playing it cool” games you get in England, none of the whole “should I, shouldn’t I” text message extravaganza.
Jerusalem is Israel’s capital city but the gay capital of the country is Tel Aviv. Bustling and modern, with a warm air of hedonism flowing through it, Tel Aviv has a fine gay scene with a number of bars, clubs, saunas and gay sex shops on its streets. At bars like Evita, a hip, young crowd converges after midnight – none of the gay nightlife gets going much before this – to party into the early hours.
The city is also host to the House Of Freedom. Opened in the late 1990s, this is a shelter for gay, lesbian and transgender youngsters between the ages of 12 and 18 who have been thrown out of home after coming out to their parents. At the House Of Freedom they are counselled by social workers who then visit the parents and attempt to bring about a reconciliation. Those attempts are often successful, each year hundreds of gay youngsters return to a better home thanks to this remarkable institution.
However, the city’s gay scene does not represent a gay ghetto inside which gay men have to hide. Brandon, 22, moved to Tel Aviv from upstate New York to study at one of the city’s universities. He has a boyfriend back home and he told me they could never consider holding hands in public there. However, when I met Brandon, he was hoping that his boyfriend would soon visit him in Israel. “I can’t wait for him to get here so I can show him how gay-friendly this place is,” he says. “I think he’ll be surprised. I think a lot of people would be.” He has no doubts they will hold hands on the streets of Tel Aviv.
Justin Rudzki agrees. He and his boyfriend Raphael regularly hold hands as they walk around the city. How much abuse have you received, I asked him. “None,” he replied, clearly dumbstruck that I even had to ask.
Shai Doitsh, spokesman for the National Association Of GLBT In Israel (AGUDA), expands on this theme. “It is not big deal at all for a gay couple to kiss in the street in Tel Aviv,” he says. “In fact, we now have a joke that if a man and a woman are seen kissing in the street, that is more strange!” Shai is full of enthusiasm for the gay scene in Tel Aviv and is looking forward to word getting out about it. “Our gay scene must be the best kept secret in the gay world,” he says.
However, efforts are being made by Shai and his colleagues to get that secret out and to attract more gay visitors to Israel. Shai is producing a gay map of Tel Aviv so visitors can find all the city’s gay venues. The tourist industry here is brilliant geared up to deal with gay visitors. For instance, tourist industry conventions in Israel include seminars on gay tourists and how to treat them.
Perhaps the most surprising gay visitors to Israel are those from the West Bank and Gaza Strip. AGUDA organises Arabic gay evenings where gay Palestinians are invited to come and party with Israelis – and many take up the invitation. “We are their only hope,” he says. “If they came out where they live, they would be killed but they can come and party with us in Israel.”
Mahmoud (not his real name) is a 19-year-old gay Israeli Arab from a small town outside Tel Aviv. He is enormously grateful to mainstream Israel for its gay-friendliness. “I cannot be open at all in the town where I live,” he sighs, “because it is a predominantly Arab town.” What would happen if you came out in the town you live in, I ask. “Very, very bad things,” he says and refuses to elaborate.
However, the gay scene of Tel Aviv offers him a haven. “I can come here and be myself,” he smiles. “This is a lifesaver for me.” He insists he has never faced hostility on the Tel Aviv gay scene because of his Arab roots.
Bob is an Israeli Jew who regularly sees Israeli Arabs on Tel Aviv’s gay scene. “I definitely welcome them all,” he insists. “To be honest, Israeli Arabs do often bond together in general society, rather than mingling with Israeli Jews. But on the gay scene, things are different and Israeli Arabs are often seen and welcomed in our bars.”
So what about liaisons between the two communities, along the lines of Justin Rudzki’s? Yossi says that many Israeli Jews are attracted to Israeli Arabs. “I suppose they are the forbidden fruit for us and we probably represent similar to them. So it is an attractive prospect all round. Tourists, too, are a popular prospect among Israeli gays. Everyone wants to fuck a tourist.”
What wonderful news! Israel is full of absolutely gorgeous men and women. I asked all of my interviewees what the best aspect of the gay scene in Israel is, and all answered with two words: “the men”. It’s true. If you come to Israel, bring some Rescue Remedy with you because you are going to be in constant shock at the sheer beauty of pretty much human being you encounter. Forget the Six Day War that Israel fought in 1967, my trip to Israel – which was one day shy of a week – was a Six Day Phwoar.
In England, soldiers are widely fetishised in gay porn films and on websites like gaydar. However, these fantasies normally remain just that: fantasies. That guy in Soho who promises you he is a soldier is in all likelihood a PA for a fashion firm in reality. In Israel, however, national service requires all Israeli men to join the IDF at 18 for three years, so if you go to any of the country’s gay bars you are almost guaranteed to be able to pick up a solider. After all, plenty of the ranks of the IDF are gay and during the recent war with Hezbollah, gay Jewish porn star Michael Lewis was flown in from New York to entertain the troops.
When I met him, Yossi had recently taken on a one-man initiative to raise morale among the troops: “I pulled one four days ago,” he says, and shows me a photo of the guy that he took on his mobile phone. Very nice too. “Sadly he only spoke Hebrew and I don’t know the Hebrew word for uniform so I couldn’t get him to put it on for me!”
It is not just the boys who make your jaw drop. It seems that every inch of land in Israel is full of history and intrigue. You don’t ever want to close your eyes in case you miss something. For instance, I took a two-hour taxi ride from the blissful peace of the Dead Sea to the bustling metropolis of Tel Aviv. During this time I saw tanks from the 1948 war of independence; passed an ancient guesthouse where Jesus stayed; stared in admiration at a quartet of an ultra-orthodox Jew, an Arab, a uniformed Israeli soldier and a mini-skirt wearing girl in her late teens all engaging in friendly chit-chat as they waited for some traffic lights to change – Israel’s troubles in the region are well-publicised but sights such as this happy quartet are far from unheard of in the country’s big cities. Also during this ride I looked over at the old town of Jerusalem and then rode a camel around a petrol station full of Bedouin Arabs. Meanwhile, the Bauhaus architecture in Tel Aviv is not just wonderful to look at, it is also a poignant “fuck you” to the Nazis who banned Bauhaus from Europe. But now Bauhaus buildings stand tall and proud in Israel, as do the Jews who Hitler tried to destroy.
Israel is a fantastic place to visit for anyone, gay men included. No, perhaps gay men especially. However, it is more than just a great country for us to visit. We’ve crowned a lot of gay icons down the years: artists, musicians and others who have inspired us, thrilled us and enjoyed a deep mutual admiration with us. Many of them have overcome enormous brutality and responded to that brutality with dignity and in style. To that list of gay icons we can now perhaps add the country of Israel, which for gay men represents a beacon of light in a dark region, and a land of enormous promise and pleasure.
UNSPEAKABLE LOVE
Unspeakable love
Brian Whitaker on homosexuality in the Middle East and the gay Palestinians who have taken refuge in Israel
The Jewish Quarterly
Summer 2006
www.jewishquarterly.org/article.asp?articleid=218
Open homosexuality is a social and religious taboo almost everywhere in the Middle East. In Iran and most Arab countries, same-sex acts are illegal and punishable by imprisonment, flogging or sometimes death. Even in countries where homosexuality is not specifically outlawed, such as Egypt, generalized laws against “immorality” are used to target gay men.
The notable exception is Israel, where same-sex relations between men became legal in 1988. Four years after de-criminalizing homosexuality, Israel went a step further and is now the only country in the Middle East that outlaws discrimination based on sexual orientation.
The law has certainly made its impact felt, requiring the military to treat gay and lesbian members of the armed forces equally and, in one celebrated case, forcing El Al to provide a free ticket for the partner of a gay flight attendant, as for the partners of heterosexuals. And in 1998 Israel’s tolerance of sexual diversity attracted worldwide attention when the transgender Dana International won the Eurovision Song Contest.
In an essay on Israel’s gay history, Lee Walzer, author of Between Sodom and Eden (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), explains:
“The reasons for gay and lesbian political success during this period from 1988 through the mid-1990s were many. Chief among them was the fact that gay activists pursued a very mainstream strategy, seeking to convince the wider public that gay Israelis were good patriotic citizens who just happened to be attracted to the same sex.
“This strategy, pursued until recently, reinforced the perception that gay rights was a non-partisan issue, unconnected to the major fissure in Israeli politics, the Arab-Israeli conflict and how to resolve it. Embracing gay rights enabled Israelis to pat themselves on the back for being open-minded, even as Israeli society wrestled less successfully with other social inequalities.”
Across the Green Line in the West Bank and Gaza, however, the picture is very different. The penalty for same-sex acts under Palestinian law is not entirely clear, though in practice this is less significant than the extra-judicial punishments reportedly meted out by the authorities and the threats that gay men face from relatives intent on preserving family “honour”.
Writing in the New Republic (19 August 2002), Yossi Halevi described the case of “Tayseer”, a Palestinian from Gaza, who was 18 when an elder brother caught him in bed with a boyfriend. His family beat him and his father threatened to strangle him if it ever happened again. A few months later, a young man Tayseer had never met invited him into an orange grove for sex:
“The next day he received a police summons. At the station Tayseer was told that his sex partner was in fact a police agent whose job is to ferret out homosexuals. If Tayseer wanted to avoid prison, he too would have to become an undercover sex agent, luring gays into orchards and turning them over to the police.
“Tayseer refused to implicate others. He was arrested and hung by his arms from the ceiling. A high-ranking officer he didn’t know arranged for his release and then demanded sex as payback.
“Tayseer fled Gaza to Tulkarem on the West Bank, but there too he was eventually arrested. He was forced to stand in sewage water up to his neck, his head covered by a sack filled with faeces, and then he was thrown into a dark cell infested with insects and other creatures he could feel but not see... During one interrogation, police stripped him and forced him to sit on a Coke bottle.”
The key ingredients of Tayseer’s story are repeated in other published accounts given by gay fugitives from the West Bank and Gaza: a violent family reaction, entrapment and blackmail by the police coupled with degrading improvised punishments. The hostility of families is a predictable response from those who regard homosexuality as a betrayal of “traditional” Arab-Islamic values. This attitude is by no means unique to the Palestinians, but while it may be possible in some Arab countries to take refuge in the anonymity of big cities, the Palestinian territories are small, with mainly close-knit communities where it is difficult to hide.
Religious condemnation of homosexuality found in Judaism, Christianity and Islam derive mainly from the biblical story of Lot and the destruction of Sodom, which also figures in the Qur’an. In recent decades progressive Jews and Christians have increasingly questioned traditional interpretations of scripture and moved towards acceptance of homosexuality, at least within stable, loving relationships. As for Islam, however, the trend has generally been in the opposite direction – partly because of the weakness of secular or progressive religious currents but mainly because political conditions have led to a growth of religiosity and recourse to supposedly traditional Arab-Islamic values.
Historically at least, the view that homosexual acts should be punished by execution is a feature of all three monotheistic religions. Britain applied the death penalty for sodomy over several centuries – originally on the basis of ecclesiastical law – up until 1861.
Today, Islamic law is widely interpreted in the same way by many prominent and widely respected scholars, including Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the leading Shi’a cleric in Iraq, whose fatwa advocating death for liwat (sodomy) was posted in Arabic on his website. A number of gay men have been systematically murdered in Iraq recently and campaigners say the fatwa provided religious sanction and encouragement for the killings.
Four years ago in Israel, a prominent rabbi, David Batzri, also advocated the death penalty. “Homosexuals and lesbians are not only a sickness,” he told Maariv newspaper in February 2002. Last year, during the gay pride parade in Jerusalem, a religious extremist attacked three marchers with a knife and reportedly told the police he had come “to kill in the name of God”.
Of course, there are important differences between Israel and the Arab countries – particularly in the reaction to such views. Rabbi Batzri’s remarks caused public outrage and the man who attacked the Jerusalem parade was promptly arrested. In Israel, religious figures and their legal opinions carry far less weight, and the rights of gay people are protected by the state.
For gay Palestinians who feel persecuted at home, the obvious escape route is to Israel, but because of the political conflict this can be fraught with difficulties. As far as most Palestinians are concerned, fleeing into Israel is a betrayal of their cause, while gay men who remain in the Palestinian territories also come under suspicion.
“In the West Bank and Gaza, it is common knowledge that if you are homosexual you are necessarily a collaborator with Israel,” said Shaul Gonen, of the Israeli Society for the Protection of Personal Rights (“ ‘Death Threat’ to Palestinian Gays”, BBC, 3 March 2003). Bassim Eid, of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, explained:
“In the Arab mindset, a person who has committed a moral offence is often assumed to be guilty of others, and it radiates out to the family and community. As homosexuality is seen as a crime against nature, it is not hard to link it to collaboration – a crime against nation” (“Palestinian Gay Runaways Survive on Israeli Streets”, Reuters, 17 September 2003).
Regarding gay men as politically treacherous is not unique to the Israeli-Palestinian situation. There are parallels here with Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, when gay men engaged in secret government work were treated as a particular security risk. In the popular imagination, this may well have been seen as an intrinsic part of their psychological make-up, although the fact that their sexual activities were illegal did expose them to the possibility of blackmail by Soviet agents.
Equating homosexuality with collaboration makes it extremely dangerous for Palestinians to return home after fleeing to Israel. One man told Halevi in the New Republic of a friend in the Palestinian police who ran away to Tel Aviv but later went back to Nablus, where he was arrested and accused of being a collaborator:
“They put him in a pit. It was the fast of Ramadan, and they decided to make him fast the whole month but without any break at night. They denied him food and water until he died in that hole.”
There is little doubt that some – though by no means all – gay Palestinians are forced by their precarious existence to work for Israeli intelligence in exchange for money or administrative favours such as the right of residence; both Eid and Gonen said they knew of several. Others, meanwhile, are coerced into undercover work for the Palestinian authorities; one 19-year-old runaway stated in an interview with Israeli television that he had been pressurized by the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade to become a suicide bomber in order to “purge his moral guilt”, though he had refused (“Palestinian Gay Runaways”, Reuters, 17 September 2003).
Estimates of the number of gay Palestinians who have quietly – and usually illegally – taken refuge in Israel range from 300 to 600. Although Israel is a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention and recognizes same-sex partnerships for immigration purposes, it does not welcome gay Palestinians – mainly because of security fears. This often leaves them trapped in an administrative no-man’s-land with little hope of finding a proper job and constantly at risk of being arrested and deported. Some try to disguise themselves by wearing fake military dog-tags and even Star of David medallions.
“The Palestinians say if you are gay, you must be a collaborator, while the Israelis treat you as a security threat,” Gonen told a news programme (“Palestinian Gays Flee to Israel”, BBC, 22 October 2003). But even if they are neither collaborators nor a security threat, they can easily become targets for exploitation by Israeli men. “They work as prostitutes, selling their bodies unwillingly because they have to survive,” Gonen said:
“Sometimes the Israeli secret police try to recruit them, sometimes the Palestinian police try to recruit them. In the end they find themselves falling between all chairs. Nobody wants to help them, everybody wants to use them.”
VIOLENCE AGAINST IRAQ GAYS CONTINUES
Saddam Hussein execution unlikely to end violence against Iraq gays
By 365Gay.com Newscenter Staff
December 31, 2006
Human rights group say that the execution of Saddam Hussein will not end the kidnappings and murders of gays in Iraq, mainly in the capital of Baghdad.
As roaming militias of Sunni and Shiites jockey for power dozens of gay men and lesbians have been seized and taken away, never to be heard from again. As the country continues its downward path toward civil war the struggle for power has moved beyond Hussein loyalists.
Iraq’s small LGBT community is mostly closeted. Homosexuality was a crime under Saddam’s regime and there has been no improvement since the US led invasion.
In March, prominent Shiite cleric Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani called for death to gays.
The actual violence against gays first became known in April when IRIN, United Nations sponsored media group, reported it had learned from Rainbow For Life, an Iraqi LGBT group that 12 of its members in Baghdad had been killed by militia kidnappers when their ransom demands could not be met.
Another 70 have been threatened with kidnapping the group said.
“We know for certain that those killed were targeted because of their sexual preferences,” Mustafa Salim, a spokesperson for Rainbow for Life, told IRIN.
Last month, five more gay activists were abducted at gun-point by Iraqi police in Baghdad according to the British LGBT rights group Outrage. Their fate remains unknown.
The men, ranging in age from 19 to 27 were identified only by their first names – Amjad, Rafid, Hassan, Ayman and Ali. All were members of Iraq’s clandestine gay rights movement, Iraqi LGBT which Outrage had been helping get gays out of the capital.
Ali Hili, a gay Iraqi Muslim who is head of Iraqi LGBT and Middle East spokesperson for Outrage said that at the time of the police raid, the five men were holding a secret meeting in a safe house in the al-Shaab district of Baghdad and were on the phone with him.
“Suddenly there was a lot of noise, then the connection ended,” Hili said.
Just days after these five activists were abducted, Haydar Kamel, aged 35, the owner of a well known men’s clothing store in the al-Karada district of Baghdad, was kidnapped near his home in Sadr city. The kidnappers are alleged to have been members of the Mahdi army, an Islamist militia loyal to fundamentalist leader Muqtada al-Sadr.
“Haydar had previously received death threats because of rumors about his alleged homosexuality. For many months, he had financially supported several men who were in hiding after they had been threatened by death squads because of claims that they were gay,” said Hili.
Dozens of similar raids by men wearing army and police uniforms have been carried out in the capital.